Altered states: rethiinking the landscape � Mildura
� Echuca � Wangaratta � Horsham
� Bendigo
� Ballarat � Melbourne
By the time Victoria started seriously looking at creating a representative national parks system in the early 1970s, two thirds of the land was already in private hands and effectively out of reach as part of a broad reserve system.
“Y
OU HAVE TO LIVE WITH HISTORY,”
says Carrie Deutsch, who is project leader of Victoria Naturally, an alliance of eight environment groups led by the Victorian National Parks Association and formed to tackle the state’s growing biodiversity crisis. “You live with the fact that anywhere that was flat and fertile, anywhere you could put sheep on was taken over for development within the first 50 years of European settlement in Victoria.” By the time the Land Conservation Council was formed in 1971 with a mandate to look at appropriate uses of public land it was too late to protect many bushland types, including our native grasslands and grassy woodlands. A large part of Victoria Naturally’s role is to tackle the issues that affect biodiversity across all landscapes, whether they are in national parks, on private land, along streamsides or our coastal areas.
Living in a scarred landscape Since European settlement the Victorian landscape has been radically altered – we’ve cleared some 70% of the state’s native vegetation and more than a third of our wetlands have been drained. On private land 92% of
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native vegetation has been cleared. These losses have had massive impacts on the state’s biodiversity, particularly in areas such as the Victorian Volcanic Plain, parts of the Mallee and Wimmera and most of the Victorian Riverina. “Our national parks are crucial to the protection of many of our ecological systems but there are key systems hardly protected at all, including Buloke woodlands in the Wimmera and Red Gum forests along the Murray River,” Ms Deutsch says. “The native trees, shrubs and grasses that remain on private land are often of high conservation significance and important for salinity control and water quality as well as habitat for threatened species like the Red-tailed Black Cockatoo.” Native vegetation controls and work being carried out by groups such as Landcare and Greening Australia are helping us restore our land, but with climate change threatening increased temperatures and lower rainfall, the need to restore habitat has never been stronger.
Land and Biodiversity White Paper We need to re-evaluate how we relate to our environment and the State Government’s
recently-launched Land and Biodiversity White Paper process offers us that chance. “When we looked at public land in Victoria it led to our national park and reserve system growing from four per cent to 17% since the 1970s,” Ms Deutsch says. “Now we need to take a big-picture approach to the entire landscape, one that takes into account the health of ecosystems not just in national parks but also other public land such as roadsides and cemeteries, as well as on private land. “We need top quality science and data as well as practical on-ground knowledge to plan for resilient ecosystems that can help us all – community, government and business – work out how to deal with the various threats to our biodiversity, especially the vagaries of climate change. And biolinks, which are already underway in some areas, could have a huge role to play in such a system, especially in terms of species surviving the impacts of climate change.” Biolinks are a response to earlier research done by Victorian scientists looking at the effects of climate change on a range of native animals. They found that as temperatures increase the distribution range of many species will alter as plants and animals are forced further south or to higher ground in search of cooler climates.
The same phenomenon occurred during the last Ice Age. Studies of protected gullies in East Gippsland have revealed the existence of plants that failed to survive elsewhere in the region. Dr Ian Mansergh, who played a key role in the earlier work, says species live in climates that are suitable to them. “So when we looked at where species will go as the climate changes we found there were areas with large concentrations of species, called refugias. That’s why the Grampians have so many rare plants, it’s high in altitude and hilly, so you have a whole lot of habitats in a small area,” he says. Many of these refugias are in national parks. But national parks are rarely linked by bushland, making it difficult if not impossible for species to move between them as they try to stay within their habitat range. “Many species can’t cross farmland, they need habitat, and so we tried to link those areas through what we call biolinks,” Dr Mansergh says. Biolinks are bigger and far more complex than traditional wildlife corridors. They can be tens of kilometres wide, hundreds of kilometres long and include private properties and agriculture. Public land such as parks, revegetated streamsides and road reserves are key compo-
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Victoria has cleared far more land, and significantly depleted more ecosystems, than any other state. FAR LEFT: Victoria’s “broad vegetation types” in pre-European times (c. 1760). DCE map. CENTRE: Victoria today, after clearing some two thirds of the State. Most affected are native grasslands and grassy woodlands, but many other ecosystem types are fragmented, and isolated, leaving them very vulnerable to climate change, as well as weed and pest invasion. DCE map. RIGHT: Indicative map of possible habitat linkages, and biodiversity refugia. Based on DCE map, 1992, and Brereton et al (1995).
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Tuning in to the big picture
O
VER THE PAST FIVE YEARS THE WILDERNESS
Society has been working with a group of leading Australian and international landscape ecologists to develop a new, long-term conservation vision covering the entire country. Called WildCountry, the vision recognises that for conservation to be successful it needs to work across all land-tenure boundaries, not just within national parks and special reserve areas. Emeritus Professor Harry Recher, who is part of the WildCountry Science Council and recognised internationally as an expert in animal ecology, says an important difference between the WildCountry concept and the reserve system being developed in Australia is that WildCountry does not exclude degraded lands from conservation initiatives. He says one of its primary goals is to produce an Australia-wide system of interconnected core protected areas, each surrounded and linked by lands managed under conservation objectives. “Eventually every region on the continent would be represented,” he says. The work is already paying off in Victoria, with The Wilderness Society’s Richard Hughes identifying the western part of the state as an area long neglected. Mr Hughes has been working with key stake-
Further reading Brereton, R., Bennett, S. and Mansergh, I., 1995. Enhanced greenhouse climate change and its potential effects on selected fauna of south-eastern Australia: a trend analysis. Biological Conservation 72: 39354.
holders, holding community forums and science meetings looking at long-term conservation in the area. WildCountry’s vision for Victoria is about the whole, rather than parts of the picture. The longterm goal is to protect, manage and restore biodiversity across the entire country. The central component of WildCountry is the identification and conservation of the large scale, long-term ecological processes that drive and enhance “connectivity” between ecosystems and species. Understanding ecological processes is crucial to developing new approaches to protection, management and restoration of biodiversity in the long term. And it’s not simply about science. For WildCountry to work it must involve collaboration with all organisations, communities, governments and individuals with responsibilities for land stewardship in a region. Importantly, it also recognises the need to promote a sustainable economy that is compatible with conservation. For more information: www.wilderness.org.au/campaigns/wildcountry — Dr James Watson, national WildCountry program co-ordinator, The Wilderness Society
nents that will become increasingly important. Properties and habitat purchased for biodiversity or voluntarily managed can make major contributions. Trust for Nature, which is part of the Victoria Naturally alliance, works closely with landholders, catchment management authorities and communities to conserve and manage remnant vegetation left on private land right across the state. “Our covenanting program on private land already helps create biolinks that reconnect fragmented native vegetation,” says Trust for Nature’s Conservation Manager Dr Chris Williams. “In addition, Trust for Nature buys privately-held habitat on the open market, on-selling some properties through our Revolving Fund while retaining others as mostly community-managed reserves.” Dr Williams said this type of landscape-scale conservation helps maximise private landholders’
contribution towards “biolinking” Victoria. “For example, with the help of the CMAs and landholders, we have created clusters of covenants, Revolving Fund properties and reserves next to the Little Desert National Park to create a buffer zone for the park. We have also helped create a similar situation in the Wartook Valley to protect flora and fauna in the Grampians,” he says.
Big picture approach Associate Professor Andrew Bennett from Deakin University is currently leading a group of senior Victorian ecologists reviewing the role ecological processes play in maintaining Victoria’s biodiversity. Hosted by Deakin University, the work is the result of a challenge set down by Victoria Naturally and is being funded through a WildCountry Small Grants Program.
The results, expected later this year, will feed into a second project that will then explore the policy implications of the findings. Dr Bennett says the important thing to remember about biolinks is that they are part of a new way of looking at the environment, one that views the system as a whole rather than as a set of individual national parks. This “big-picture” thinking goes all the way back to the 1970s when ecologists started seeing Victoria’s parks and reserves as little islands in a fragmented landscape. “If isolation is a problem then we need to connect things up,” Dr Bennett says. “We need to think about whole systems and how they interconnect.” He is also keen to ensure that we don’t lose sight of the amount of habitat that has already been lost. In woodland areas we start losing bird species once native vegetation cover drops below 30%. “Research is showing that it is the amount
of habitat that is the critical issue - how it is arranged is important but not as much as how much of it there is,” he says. “Biolinks are large, regional-scale connections that can achieve both tasks because they not only protect areas but also increase habitat and enhance connectivity.”
Biodiversity — ACT NOW! Make sure your voice is heard as part of the first phase of the State Government’s Land and Biodiversity White Paper process. Download the consultation paper Land and Biodiversity at a T i m e o f C l i m a t e C h a n g e f r o m www.dse.vic.gov.au/landwhitepaper/ and use it to make a submission or download our simple electronic submission form, which you can get by going to www.vnpa.org.au and clicking on the Victoria Naturally link. Submissions close June 22. — John Sampson, Victoria Naturally
Mount Sturgeon, at the southern end of the Serra Range in the Grampians. Our natural landscapes must be buffered and linked, to allow species migration in the face of climate change. PHOTO: LINDSAY STEPANOW.
The Victoria Naturally alliance wants to see significant outcomes from the Land and Biodiversity White Paper, including: • Greatly increased efforts to control weeds and • A large boost in funds for restoration of feral animals in our national parks and other bushlands for landholders, including for protected areas, to give natural systems some commercial farmers. resilience in the face of climate change. • A burgeoning restoration industry that provides jobs for rural Victoria and is based on strong science and works with local communities. 18
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