Welcome

From the President

Your NPA 

Environmental News

Features

Marine Scene

Western News

Your Parks

Letters
To The Editor

Reviews

Legacy

Features - Connectivity

Let’s get connected
NPA Connectivity projects
Connect to Protect
Key Habitats and Corridors North-east New South Wales

Let’s get connected NPA Executive Officer ANDREW COX gives an overview of the rise of connectivity as a critical conservation issue. It is clear that 'connectivity' is the big catch-word in biodiversity conservation for the current decade. Ramsar Convention Secretary General, Peter Bridgewater, put it bluntly when speaking at the World Parks Congress in Durban, South Africa in 2003:

Protected areas are often seen as 'hermetically sealed bubbles' or 'islands of conservation in an ocean of destruction'. But unless protected areas are part of well-managed landscapes/seascapes, there will be nothing to protect.

Durban Link, a key Congress output, states there is 'a clear view that the key to linkages is that parks exist not as unique islands, but as places in a matrix.'
It continues: 'One conclusion was that park management needs to focus on the ecological, biophysical and bio-cultural linkages happening on land and sea, because ignoring the matrix is the most dangerous part of trying to ensure long term conservation. A second conclusion was that protected areas both need and can provide for ecological, cultural and social resilience if managed in an ecologically sustainable land/seascape, and that therefore they are the 'resilience parachutes' of the world, concentrates of biological and cultural diversity.'
Australian scientists were instrumental in building a strong case for the important role of corridors and connectivity in the heavily cleared Western Australia wheat belt during the 1980s and 1990s. While much of this has translated into action on the ground to put in place an effectively managed conservation network in the WA wheat belt, elsewhere, progress has been decidedly slow.
A selection of other standout work that advances the connectivity theme includes:
The Role of Connectivity in Australian Conservation (Soule et. al. 2004) A landmark scientific paper that pulls together the latest thinking on the importance of connectivity for biodiversity.
Gondwana Link: This collaborative initiative in south-west WA led by five non-government groups seeks to undo the damage done by clearing for agriculture and counter the extinctions that are probably due to salinity, fragmentation and global warming. The first step aims to establish a link joining the 100 km gap between Fitzgerald River and Stirling Ranges national parks. In the long term, it seeks to restore biodiversity and ecosystem function across an arc of more than 1,000 km extending from Margaret River in the west, through the Karri forests and then east to the drier eastern ecosystems to Kalgoorlie. After more than five years work, the plan is well developed and over 70,000 seedlings have already been planted. See www.gondwanalink.org.

Connect to Protect
JOHN MACRIS has been instrumental in the establishment of NPA's new Connect to Protect campaign. Here he describes the process ....
Throughout many parts of the world, concerned people are looking at their region's nature conservation estate and daring to visualise ways of securing into the future the values they now see. In some regions, there's precious little area dedicated for conservation and the challenge is to repair degradation, acquire new formal reserves and set up long lasting informal protection measures across the landscape. NPA's work in the inland regions such as the Riverina, and in the marine environment, are good examples along these lines.
Along the eastern highlands and seaboard, where there is now a fairly solid backbone of National Parks created from mainly public land, our vision is about setting up a true networked conservation landscape extending through southern Queensland, NSW, the ACT and Victoria. Not just a network hugging the steep lands that remain forested - as much due to their stubborn rugged resilience as to our passions on their behalf - but rather one that also samples east-west sweeps of diverse habitats, from grassed open forests of the tablelands to alluvial woodlands of the coastal lowlands.
The launch of the NPA report Connect to Protect - Eastern Links is set to occur very shortly It is the culmination of a process spanning several years.
It is better, though, to think of it as the start of something: we now take the concept to politicians and potential external allies (already there have been cooperative approaches with the Wilderness Society's Wild Country project). The building of 'people networks' is recognised as a key to achieving ecological networks. We will seek new gains in some of the significant conservation gaps such as the upper Manning and Hunter catchments, Robertson Plateau and several proposed east-to-west branches.
Treat it if you like as a kind of friendly race with other corridor programs around Australia such as Western Australia's ambitious Gondwana Link, or the Riverlands to Mallee efforts in South Australia.
More information
To learn more about Connect to Protect, visit the NPA web site, www.npansw.org.au/connecttoprotect

Key Habitats and Corridors North-east New South Wales

The Key Habitats and Corridors (KHC) project identifies, for the first time, a regional framework for the conservation of forest fauna in north-east New South Wales, writes ASHLEY LOVE The KHC approach was developed by David Scotts and Michael Drielsma at the NSW Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC).2,4 It provides for the systematic consideration of forest fauna as a conservation focus across the landscape by adopting both species and ecological processes as planning tools.

The Connect to Protect - Eastern Links projected future macro corridor

Initially, the distributions of key species for conservation are individually modelled across the landscape. The individual models for up to 100 species are then integrated into assemblages of species with similar distributions with the aid of innovative Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis tools.
From the assemblages, regional key habitats for forest fauna are identified as landscape focus areas for habitat protection and as potential protected area cores and buffers. Linkage pathways are then identified and refined to map regional and sub-regional corridors that link the key habitats. These corridors also act as focus areas for habitat protection, enhancement and restoration. Finally, key habitats and corridors are consolidated as a regional landscape conservation framework. The mapped outputs provide the only spatially complete, data-driven and systematically derived conservation planning framework currently available for the region.
The north-east KHC is available on the DEC website.1 The website provides mapped key habitats and corridors, lists of the species behind the derivation of each corridor and species profiles. Landholders, for example, can use the website to identify whether their property is part of a key fauna habitat or wildlife corridor; the species likely to utilize the habitat or corridor; and find out how to identify those species on their properties.

Extension of KHC The seamless extension of the north-east KHC to the Nandewar Bioregion was a logical step for fauna conservation planning during the recent Western Regional Assessment in that area. Following several years of systematic fauna surveys in the Bioregion, fauna ecologists used a range of information, including: point localities of species and habitats; field knowledge and environmental information such as vegetation information; and soil fertility, to derive a mapped output of KHC for the bioregion.3

Example of a map of Key Habitats and Corridors from the NPWS Key Habitats and Corridors website.

Although this approach was different to that used for the derivation of KHC in north-east NSW, it produced a definitive KHC, reflecting the availability of data on the coast.
The KHC approach has been expanded to other areas of NSW including the Central Coast, parts of the South Coast and the Southern Tablelands.
Application in conservation planning
KHC has received broad support and has been widely incorporated into conservation planning in north-east NSW at a range of planning scales and processes.
On the state-wide scale, KHC was considered by the National Parks Association in developing its Eastern Links project. KHC has been used extensively by state government agencies in regional and local planning. It has been used by the Northern Rivers, Gwydir, Border Rivers and Hunter and Central Rivers Catchment Management Authorities in the development of priorities for conservation and restoration.
The Department of Planning has used KHC in regional strategic planning for the Lower Hunter, the Far North Coast and the South Coast. It is being used by the Department of Environment and Conservation for threatened species, reserve and acquisition planning as well as for regional conservation planning in coastal regions. KHC has been used by the Roads and Traffic Authority in planning upgrades for the Pacific Highway and by the Department of Lands for Crown land and Crown leasehold assessment.
Local government authorities have broadly adopted KHC as a matter for consideration in determining development proposals. A number of Councils have incorporated KHC more broadly into local environmental planning. For example, Byron Shire has included KHC (with local refinements) into proposed environmental protection zones and Great Lakes Shire Council has incorporated KHC into planning for urban release areas.
New developments
New modelling approaches are being developed by DEC, building on the earlier applications of KHC. One major new development relies on a new modelling approach that predicts how much of an area's biodiversity is likely to persist into the future given a particular land use scenario.
In this approach, broad vegetation communities can be used as surrogates for biodiversity or the persistence of individual species can be analysed.5 By predicting the contribution to persistence made by habitat patches (instead of merely presence or absence of a species), this approach represents a leap forward from the existing static habitat models.
References
1. National Parks and Wildlife Service. Key Habitats and Corridors in North East NSW. Online at http://maps.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/keyhabs/default.htm
2. Scotts D. 2003. Key habitats and corridors for forest fauna: a landscape approach for conservation in north-east New South Wales. NSW NPWS Occasional Paper 32. NSW Department of Conservation and the Environment.
3. Andren M. 2004. Nandewar biodiversity surrogates: vertebrate fauna. Report for the Resource and Conservation Assessment Council (RACAC) NSW Western Regional Assessments. Project No. NAND05. Department of Environment and Conservation, Coffs Harbour.
4. Scotts D & Drielsma MJ. 2003. Developing landscape frameworks for regional conservation planning: an approach integrating fauna spatial distributions and ecological principles. Pacific conservation Biology 9: 96-119.
5. DEC 2004. Nandewar WRA Landscape Conservation. Report for the Resource and Conservation Assessment Council (RACAC) NSW Western Regional Assessments. Project No. NAND01. Department of Environment and Conservation, Coffs Harbour.