The Arboretum Project

The Arboretum project

TropEco is responsible for developing and bringing our campus Arboretums to life, focused around sustainability, education, conservation and ensuring the campus experience is memorable for our students. Our Townsville campus is our TropEco Botany centre with hundreds of species grown at our dedicated greenhouses for conservation and research, rehabilitation, our community garden, teaching and learning and sustainable landscaping.

Sustainable landscaping: At TropEco we are striving to find more climatically suitable species for landscaping to decrease our water usage and ensure no environmental threats are used in our landscape. This has been brought to life with the use of rare, and even never before cultivated, species from all over the world to ensure more sustainable and interactive designs. On the Townsville campus this is focused around creating a tropical environment using the world's arid land species such as the famous Boabs and native grasses, and in Cairns swapping environmental threats for native counterparts and rarely cultivated rainforest locals.

Conservation and Research: Through TropEco student engagement projects with a conservation and research heart have been implemented to assist in some of the concerns facing our Australian flora while allowing students the opportunity to be involved in hands on change. This includes growing species at risk of pathogens such as the dreaded myrtle rust, cultivating never before grown species and using endangered species on the campus for developmental landscaping or local translocation projects.

Rehabilitation: One of TropEco’s roles is recovering and improving our beautiful campus' native bushland. This includes not only removing and controlling weeds but also replanting thousands of native plants back onto the campus each year.  These species help improve the habitat for our campus fauna, as well as assisting in carbon trapping and soil regeneration.

Teaching and Learning: All around the campuses you can find special teaching and learning gardens that showcase signage and contain anything from traditional use plants to threatened species or unusual evolutionary traits. These are free for the public and schools to access and are used in some of our Bachelor and Masters subjects for a more hands on experience.