Dr Nina Welti

I am responsible for Ag & Food’s supply chain research portfolio. My focus is to maximize the impact of innovation and research aimed at improving of trust and value of Australian agrifoods supply chains. My job is to connect the complicated problems Australian industry faces to the diversity of experts developing solutions which improve the measurement, monitoring and transparency of Australian agricultural supply chains.

We aim to build a transparent and trusted solutions to empower consumers and producers with the knowledge and provide assurance that our actions accumulate to positive outcomes, underpinning the trust and confidence throughout the food supply system.

Across a 20-year career, I have worked in managed and natural ecosystems in USA, Europe, and Australia. I began wading in urban streams and graduated to large rivers, paddled through northern lakes, peatlands, and tundras, sailed to southern subtropical mangroves, and now have planted myself in Australian agricultural systems. Trained as a biogeochemist, my research seeks to constrain, quantify, and link the mechanisms of carbon and nitrogen cycling through ecosystems at regional and national scales. I use stable isotope based methods to quantify sediment and soil-based biogeochemical processes.

Today’s food supply chains are as complex as those of carbon and nitrogen. In the increasingly globalized and interdependent systems it can be challenging to know that our decisions as lead to safe and nutritious food, produced sustainability and ethically across the value chain. My team is developing tools which make use of the mechanistic understanding of carbon and nitrogen cycling to enable end to end transparency and provide assurance and verification of geographic origin.