Features

Many of the State’s conservation reserves are located in rugged, less productive or inaccessible areas. By contrast the rich fertile river valley flats were cleared long ago for agriculture, other industries or the establishment of our towns and cities. The result is that there are fewer areas, and often only very small fragments, of natural habitat left for our wildlife.

These remaining areas support vulnerable habitat types characterised by rich and diverse wildlife communities. They also include many of our threatened species. Typically, these habitat types, and the biodiversity most dependent upon them, are themselves at risk from degradation or clearing and under-represented in the reserve system. Many occur on freehold lands.

Forest wildlife will benefit from the
NPWS Key Habitats and Corridors project

To help maximise the benefits these remaining areas offer the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) has completed a mapping project to identify the key habitats and potential wildlife corridors on the state’s north coast.

The Key Habitats and Corridors (KHC) project is being undertaken by NPWS Zoologist, David Scotts, of the Northern Directorate’s Conservation Programs and Planning Division, at Coffs Harbour.

The KHC provides a planning tool to help enhance habitat preservation and restoration. It also offers land managers and planners the opportunity to adopt a landscape approach in developing a ‘state of the art’, data-driven landscape framework for conservation programs and a more scientific basis for protected area networks in north-east NSW.

To be effective, modern conservation programs must incorporate a community and landscape ethic, encompassing multiple ownership tenures and making concerted contributions to the development of comprehensive, adequate and representative (CAR) protected area networks extending across landscapes.

The KHC data has already been provided to a number of local Catchment Management Boards and Regional Vegetation Management Committees to assist them with their work. Application of a similar approach is being investigated in the Southern Directorate’s Landscape Conservation Program and also in the preparation of the Plan of Management for the Cumberland Plain.

The concept of protected area networks encompasses the landscape perspective. The formal reserve system remains the cornerstone of conservation but will never be truly adequate in size, nor sufficiently representative, to maintain sensitive species and the ecological processes they sustain.

To conserve species, we need to facilitate their ability to live within, and move throughout landscape habitats. Habitat protection and connectivity are promoted through the KHC by defining and mapping regional key habitats and linking corridors for forest fauna.

Using significant forest fauna and flora data sets already in existence and incorporating a landscape perspective, models of distributions of priority forest fauna occurrence, across all landscapes and tenures have been developed previously.

The KHC project has applied new Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis tools to consolidate and integrate predicted distributions of priority species into a practical and ecologically relevant landscape framework. The KHC project provides GIS data sets and maps of:

• Predicted distributions for priority forest fauna assemblages (combinations of priority species with similar predicted distributions);

• Regionally significant habitats for forest fauna (areas of predicted high conservation value for fauna assemblages, endemic forest vertebrates or endemic invertebrates);

• Regional and sub-regional corridors for forest fauna (landscape connections of spatial dimension and current, or potential, habitat type, likely to sustain the habitation and movement of populations of priority fauna species and to supplement wide-ranging, nomadic, or migratory species’ habitats).

The mapped key habitats and corridors provide:

o A current, consolidated regional depiction of high conservation value habitats for forest fauna across the landscapes of north-east NSW; and

o A spatially complete regional landscape conservation framework for north-east NSW, and an explicit basis for planning protected area networks.

Reserve selection is often biased to the least vulnerable environments and conservation efforts outside reserves can be ineffective unless they are strategically targeted.

The KHC project provides that strategic direction and is complementary to ongoing forestry, vegetation and water reform programs and promotes its application in a landscape framework.