Make a pollen trap

Ways to get involved

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, which are available in two formats.

1. To view or print without folding:

• Build your pollen trap (PDF, 1924 KB)
• Install your pollen trap (PDF, 1655 KB)
• Collect your pollen trap and send it to us (PDF, 2080 KB)

2. To print and fold to DL size:

• Build your pollen trap (PDF, 1924 KB)
• Install your pollen trap (PDF, 1922 KB)
• Do a plant survey around your pollen trap (PDF, 2810 KB)
• Collect your pollen trap and send it to us (PDF, 2106 KB)

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:

• Do a plant survey around a pollen trap - unfolded (PDF, 2818 KB)
• Do a plant survey around a pollen trap - fold to DL (PDF, 2810 KB)

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 epicaustralia.org.au