Providing dead wood as habitat In the last edition of Cradle to Coastlines, we introduced you to tree hollows and their importance as habitat for many Tasmanian species. There’s another resource with hidden environmental benefits that you might have on your property too: dead wood.
Dead wood shelters seedlings, encouraging regeneration in places of high herbivore pressure. Without dead wood on the ground, woodland ecosystems can transform into paddocks with isolated standing trees.
Trees that fall naturally or need to be thinned can become habitat for a huge range of organisms if you leave them in place. This dead wood (or woody debris) is then contributing to your property’s biodiversity, hosting beneficial insects and fungi, providing shelter for threatened species like bandicoots and bettongs, and eventually breaking down to contribute organic matter to the soil.
Dead wood and standing dead trees are so important to biodiversity and ecosystem resilience, that NSW lists “removal of dead wood and dead trees” as a Key Threatening Process under their Threatened Species Conservation Act. Firewood collection there (as it is in Tasmania) is a big part of the problem.
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