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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