April - Surveying Koalas

The issue of koala conservation has helped to expose inadequate proposals for reserves and assisted ongoing efforts to conserve our forests. The Eden Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) is one such case. Even by its own inadequate scientific assessment, less than 50% of the amount of habitat thought necessary to ensure the long-term conservation of koalas has been protected in reserves with this outcome. The 1998 Eden forest decision ignored the conservationists' proposal for a light logging zone to protect extended koala habitat, necessary for longterm recovery of the population.

The Southern Region RFA will also leave key koala areas unprotected. Measures such as prelogging surveys and logging protocols that are supposed to protect this endangered and high-profile species and its habitat are hopelessly inadequate.

The decline and near extinction of the koala in south-east NSW is often attributed to its supposed dependence on nutrient-rich eucalypts in fertile valley areas that were cleared for farming. However, recent research has established that koalas now surviving in the South East Forests are using eucalypt species in vegetation communities that are widespread, primarily in patches of relatively undisturbed mature forests.

Within that habitat, koalas have large individual home ranges and appear to be highly selective of feed trees, probably because there are only relatively few trees able to supply suitable browse at any one time. The reasons for this have not been established, but browse suitability is probably determined by a combination of soil fertility and mineral content, soil moisture, tree species and size, and the level of plant defence compounds in the foliage. There are likely to be other important factors yet to be identified.

This kind of habitat appears to have sustained koalas throughout much of eastern Australia before European occupation. The current absence of koalas in much of this habitat is almost certainly because it has been heavily degraded by European exploitation. Intensive logging for woodchips is the most recent and devastating chapter in that history of degradation.

In the past decade the local conservation movement, government agencies and the scientific community have been locked in a complex and sometimes dramatic saga concerning the issue of koala conservation in the South East Forests.

During that period local conservationists initiated many koala surveys in proposed logging areas, estab lished blockades to protect koala habitat, and under took extensive political lobbying and campaigning.

The strategy of State Forests (or the Forestry Commission, as it was then) was firstly to say that there were no koalas seen consistently in State Forests in the region and then, when local conservations exposed this lie, that koalas preferred regrowth. Because information about the koala in south-east NSW was virtually nonexistent, and also because forestry staff expended considerable resources attempting to prove the koalas-like-regrowth theory, the local conservation movement initiated an extensive koala research program in the region.

At the same time, the Forestry Commission (now State Forests of NSW) and the NPWS negotiated survey and logging procedures that were to be applied in koala areas in the South East Forests. However, one of the most experienced koala ecologists in Australia, Roger Martin, in the capacity of consultant to the NPWS, advised: "The current survey methods are essentially micro-survey techniques that have a low probability of detecting koalas living in low-abundance." Despite this advice these procedures, with minor variations, have remained as the basis for koala protocols in all production forests in southern NSW.

The survey protocols for the Eden RFA require a search for koala faecal pellets where a koala has been detected within 2 km of a compartment boundary in the period since 1980, or local knowledge indicates that koalas are likely to be present. This search is to be undertaken along parallel transects in the proposed logging area.

There are obvious failings with the survey procedures. Two major ones are:
1) The searches will probably not locate koalas because most of the proposed logging area will not be searched; and
2) habitat that is currently unoccupied, but may be important for the recovery of koalas, is not considered.
Consequently the search and habitat assessment process being recommended will mean that trees that are important for koalas will inevitably be felled.

The Threatened Species Unit of the NPWS is preparing a statewide koala recovery plan. However, because there is such variation in the ecology and history of the koala and in the local communities that can participate in the program, much of this work needs to be regionally based. Primarily due to local conservation efforts, the south-east NSW Koala Recovery Team has been established and is developing a recovery plan for this region.

The struggle to save our forests has a diversity of approaches. Probably the conservation movement is at its strongest when it can strengthen and nourish that diversity. Exposing issues concerning the survival and recovery of endangered species, including that of the koala, is one approach that can assist other efforts of the forest conservation movement.

* Chris Allen is President of the South East Forests Conservation Council and a long-term campaigner against woodchipping.