Beyond the lab: Adelaide University research is reaching the real world

Shellfish reefs are foundational marine habitats, Dr McAfee explains. Their three-dimensional structures provide habitat for fish and other marine life, while oysters filter water and contribute to nutrient cycling.

“When the physical reef structure was lost from the seafloor due to historical overfishing, these ecosystems could no longer recover at scale on their own,” Dr McAfee adds.

The restoration work provides a new foundation. Recycled oyster shell is placed in biodegradable bags, creating hard surfaces where native oyster larvae can settle and grow.

“Over time, the aim is for these structures to develop into living, self-sustaining reefs.”

The results were immediately encouraging. Within only months of providing reef substrate, researchers have recorded “hundreds of thousands” of young oysters living on the new shell habitat. Within 18 months, oyster communities in the new habitat are nearing reproductive age.

But for Dr McAfee, the project is about more than putting oysters back in the water.

“This project is all about taking research beyond the lab and into the communities and environments where restoration happens,” he says.

Local community involvement includes Aboriginal Land and Sea Country Ranger programs, schools, oyster growers and other coastal stakeholders.

“We’re restoring these reefs for local communities, and with local communities”, he says. “That means creating genuine opportunities for two-way learning, where scientific, cultural and local knowledge can inform where and how reefs are restored.”

That participation will be important as the reefs establish and mature, he added. The initial goal is to create healthy, self-sustaining reefs that can become hotspots for local ecological recovery and, over time, potentially act as seed sources for broader recovery.

It is also an opportunity to learn how marine ecosystems can be restored more effectively and at greater scale.

“By combining ecological monitoring with community participation, we want to develop an approach that can help rebuild the ecological foundations of South Australia’s coastal waters and strengthen their capacity to recover from future disturbance.”

Fighting two infections with one vaccine

Professor Helen Marshall is following her scientific queries into the communities where their answers matter most.

Professor Marshall is a medical researcher specialising in child health, public health and vaccinology. She is Professor in Vaccinology at Adelaide University’s School of Medicine within the College of Health, as well as Senior Medical Practitioner and Medical Director of the Vaccinology and Immunology Research Trials Unit at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital. She also serves as Clinical Research Director of the Women’s and Children’s Health Network.

Her research focuses on infectious disease prevention – specifically meningococcal B and gonorrhoea – and includes clinical trials, implementation research, infectious and social epidemiology, and public health. Much of her work involves teenagers and young adults in Australia’s regional and First Nations communities, groups that can face particular barriers to accessing vaccination.

“Gonorrhoea disproportionally impacts women, infants and First Nations young people,” Professor Marshall says. “Australia’s young Aboriginal people are also less likely to get vaccinated against meningococcal B disease, so it’s crucial we put in the effort to give them easier access to this vaccine.”

Professor Marshall led “B Part of It”, the world’s largest study into the meningococcal B vaccine. The study investigated how effectively the vaccine protects young people against meningococcal B disease, and whether vaccination could also protect communities by reducing transmission of the bacteria.

The findings showed that the vaccine successfully reduced meningococcal B disease, but was unlikely to reduce transmission. That meant the vaccine should be used to provide direct protection to people at higher risk, as a herd immunity strategy was unlikely to be successful.

The findings contributed to South Australia becoming the first place in the world to introduce a state-funded meningococcal B vaccination programme for both infants and adolescents. This policy is estimated to have averted dozens of meningococcal B cases and deaths.

But Professor Marshall’s findings do not stop there.

Her most recent research, conducted in partnership with NT Health, found that the meningococcal B vaccine was associated with a significant reduction in the risk of gonorrhoea among young people in the Northern Territory.

The finding raises the possibility that one vaccine could offer protection against two infections.

“It’s crucial we address the remaining knowledge gaps and implement programs to protect against these two infections using one vaccine,” Professor Marshall says.

Taking technology into the fields

As technology continues to advance farming and viticulture, researchers are finding new ways to apply it in fields and vineyards. Adelaide University’s Professor Volker Hessel is contributing to this evolution, enhancing crop health with digital twins.

A digital twin is a real-time digital representation of a physical system, using sensor data, drones, cameras, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to simulate an environment so users can make predictions and informed decisions. But Professor Hessel says the systems his team is creating take this concept further.

“Our digital twins are far more than just virtual copies of their physical counterparts,” he says.  “Ours are ‘performance twins’ developed specifically to improve agriculture and viticulture performance.”

Rather than simply reproducing what is happening in a vineyard or field and leaving the user to interpret the data, the performance twin is designed to propose an action, while accounting for the complex social, environmental, and economic constraints surrounding that decision. Professor Hessel’s research focuses mainly on improving crop health through water management, nutrition supply, and disease treatment.

VineGuardian puts this approach into practice for disease treatment. Developed with Australian digital-twin company XMPro and wine producer Serafino Wines, the commercial decision-support system uses cameras on the ground or drones to detect signs of disease and advise growers on treatment. The digital twin draws on inputs such as machine modelling, weather forecast data, economic considerations, and sustainability preferences to recommend the best treatment, such as fungicide choice, spray volume and intervals.

Having already commercialised VineGuardian with industry partners, Professor Hessel’s research has also produced intellectual property for designing and securing the next generation of such systems. This work is but one initiative in the vast Australian AI-geospatial-agricultural ecosystem. A broader government-funded initiative, the ‘National Digital Twin for Australian Agriculture’ at the Australasian Space Innovation Institute, has committed $15 million to boost productivity, sustainability and resilience across the sector.

Professor Hessel sees Adelaide University’s work as critical to the future of farming.

"Farming issues are complex, and we need to react to them at the highest of speeds and with the most precise of moves," he says. "Digital twins and AI are well-placed to achieve this – and I see our research as the forerunner and pacemaker in this space."