Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: TERN Webinar - Nature's Litter, Nature's Treasure. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

From one leaf to a nation's carbon budget, from the driest deserts to the wettest peatlands, litter isn't trash - it's ecology's master variable. It connects individual organisms to global cycles, field observations to policy outcomes and basic science to environmental management. Every year, Australian vegetation produces hundreds of millions of tonnes of dead plant material. What happens next, that is, whether this organic matter decomposes in weeks or persists for millennia, determines soil fertility, carbon storage, wildfire fuel loads and the accuracy of our national environmental accounting. Yet this fundamental process remains one of ecology's most perplexing puzzles, with different ecosystems playing by completely different rules. In Australia's sunbaked drylands, leaves vanish faster than rainfall alone could explain. Our decomposition models consistently predict the wrong rates because they miss a crucial player. In waterlogged peatlands, organic matter accumulates for thousands of years, creating carbon time capsules that standard decomposition theory says shouldn't exist. And in our national carbon accounts, how we track and model litter determines whether Australia accurately measures its climate commitments or miscalculates by millions of tonnes. In this webinar, international experts tackle the challenge of how do we take vastly different processes, from photobleached leaves in the Mallee to centuries-old organic matter in alpine bogs and create coherent national models that actually work. We are learning from litter science that leaf fall could be a significant factor in managing Australia's environmental challenges.