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College of Science and Engineering VegeMap Do science!

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Do science!

Ways to get involvedVegeMap logo

Get hands-on

You can help by building and monitoring your own pollen traps! It's easy - using materials you may already have at home.

Use our easy-to-follow training guides to:

Get out and about

Alternatively, you can help us monitor the pollen traps we've already installed, using our easy-to-follow training guide to:

How this helps us

It's then our job to join the dots between the plants identified in your plant surveys and the pollen collected.

We'll do that by:

  • Collecting and sorting the pollen collected from all the traps installed during the project
  • Categorising the types of pollen caught and measuring how much of each type was collected.

Then, we can get a better understanding of the pollen being produced by different types of plants in each of these environments. It's science!

Why do we want this information?

Believe it or not, pollen actually gives us a look into the past! Pollen is very durable and can be found fossilised from millions of years ago. Scientists have been able to use these fossils to track what vegetation existed in the past and the environments they lived in. Because some plants can produce more pollen than others and some pollen can travel great distances transported by air or insects.

We may know WHAT plants existed in the past but not HOW MANY. This is crucial to really understand big questions like ‘how quickly did environments change thousands of years ago?’, ‘what animals, birds and insects could have lived in those habitats?’, ‘how did people once navigate the lands?’.

About CABAH

VegeMap is funded by the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity & Heritage (CABAH). CABAH is a large collaborative research group across multiple universities and other partner organisations that focus on understanding Australia’s past so we can better prepare for the future. To find our more visit