Land and Vegetation

World Wetlands Day is celebrated each year on 2 February. It marks the anniversary of the signing of the Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar Convention) in Ramsar, Iran, on 2 February 1971.

World Wetlands Day was first celebrated in 1997. Since then government agencies, non-government organisations and community groups have celebrated World Wetlands Day by undertaking actions to raise public awareness of wetland values and benefits and promote the conservation and wise use of wetlands. These activities include seminars, nature walks, festivals, launches of new policies, announcement of new Ramsar sites, newspaper articles, radio interviews and wetland rehabilitation.

Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs) bring research and industry together in creative and cost-effective collaborations to address specific national research priorities and to develop new products and opportunities of immense value. The CRC Programme is an Australian Government funded initiative.

One of the important challenges in maximising the impact of S&T is understanding and managing the complex processes that underpin world-class S&T research and innovation. The 2008 Annual Conference of the Cooperative Research Centres Association (CRCA) is an opportunity for Australian and S&T innovators to gain valuable insights from leading bureaucrats, academics and entrepreneurs about their experiences, their successes and their failures in this arena.

The CRC Association extends an open invitation for interested parties to join representatives from 57 CRCs throughout Australia at this conference to critically evaluate how successful scientific research and development innovation can happen through cooperative research, both in Australia and abroad.

The Annual Conference of the CRC Association brings together all CRCs from across Australia to discuss the latest approaches and achievements in world-class collaborative science and education.

Old-growth forests in temperate and boreal regions are places of great beauty and importance to people. These forests are often managed for conservation and biodiversity value and as an important resource for timber production, so their management has inevitably become subject to a range of societal pressures. Current management practices for old-growth forests are increasingly informed by an understanding of the disturbance events that trigger forest regeneration. Research from several long-term experimental sites now allows a fresh look at ecologically based silviculture in forests managed for wood production. This conference will bring together researchers from a range of disciplines focussed upon achieving ecologically sustainable management and use of old-growth forests. It will include coverage of modern approaches being developed in the Pacific Northwest, Australia, South America, Scandinavia and Central Europe. The conference will include a visit to the Warra Long-Term Ecological Research site in southern Tasmania, which is partly in a World Heritage Area and also contains a silvicultural systems trial that has explored alternatives to clearfelling of old-growth forests.