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Case Study

Avon Wheatbelt 2 Highest stress class

The Avon Wheatbelt 2 subregion is within the south-west corner of Western Australia. The dominant vegetation includes woodlands of Wandoo, York Gum and Salmon Gum with Jam and Casuarina and some areas of proteaceous scrubheaths. The subregion is rich in endemics, on residual lateritic uplands and derived sandplains. Dominant land use is a mixture of dryland agriculture and grazing. Smaller areas used for conservation, crown reserves, forestry and rural residential. Special values include critical weight range fauna, ecosystems of high diversity, centres of endemism and refugia.

Condition and trend

There are two threatened ecological communities and five ecosystems at risk. All communities are either declining or rapidly declining, including wetlands of national importance and riparian zones. Species at risk are in fair or poor condition with a static or declining trend. The exceptions are two critical weight range mammals, Western Quoll (Dasyrus geoffroii) and the Black-footed Rockwallaby (Petrogale lateralis lateralis), that show an increasing size of population and range as they respond to predator control and translocation strategies.

Threatening processes

Historic broad scale clearing has affected 93% of the native vegetation. Extensive clearing has contributed to a number of other threatening processes that are also affecting biodiversity, including:

• habitat fragmentation;
• grazing pressure from domestic stock, rabbits, and kangaroos;
• foxes and cats, which are the most important factors limiting populations of small mammals;
• exotic weeds, which cause modifications to habitat structure, smother native species, outcompete them for nutrients, water and light, prevent regeneration, and alter fuel loads;
• changed fire regimes;
• pathogens such as Phytophthora spp., Armillaria and fungal stem cankers;
• secondary salinisation of soil and water, waterlogging of some areas and death to most plant species; and
• poisons, especially agricultural pesticides and eutrophication of some wetlands.

Methods

Given the extent of vegetation clearing across the wheatbelt, consolidating the reserve system to meet comprehensive, adequate and representative thresholds may not be possible to achieve biodiversity conservation goals.

The Department of Conservation and Land Management is developing a conceptual framework for managing biodiversity in the wheatbelt using five key components:

1. A description of the key elements of the wheatbelt environment, including the cycles that drive component interactions.
2. An aspirational goal and management goals that guide operational management.
3. Description of the biological assets that must be conserved to achieve the aspirational goal and management goals.
4. Description of threats to goal achievement, and their implications in ranking management strategies, and identifying priority management units for action.
5. Monitoring and evaluation methods that link goals, on-ground outputs and outcomes.

Management responses

The situation for Avon Wheatbelt 2 biodiversity is very serious. The full effects of secondary salinisation of land and water, particularly in the eastern part of the subregion, will not be fully evident for another hundred years. There are a number of actions to prevent further loss of biodiversity, including:

• continued broad scale feral predator control such as already underway through the Department of Conservation and Land Management's Western Shield program to recover threatened species;
• commercial industries aimed at revegetation of deep-rooted vegetation based on regionally native perennial plant species;
• incentives, already involving revegetation and remnant vegetation fencing and may include earthworks or financial assistance for on-farm remnant vegetation management;
• legislation, with changes proposed to the Wildlife Conservation Act 1950 and Conservation and Land Management Act;
• changing values and land use pattern with the purchase of bushland—this is already making a significant contribution to re-align land use;
• regional natural resource management groups, continuing restructure of some State agencies and establishment of Bush Brokers will add opportunities for improved conservation; and
• local government policies to apply State planning policy for the environment and natural resources to local decision-making.

There are many planning activities underway or proposed. These include:

• threat abatement planning and strategies implemented in the context of the State Salinity Strategy, Report of the Salinity Taskforce, Weed Management and Dieback Guidelines;
• industry Codes of Practice—such as Environmental Code of Practice—Extractive Industries, Environmental Management in the WA Mining Industry, Code of Practice for Timber Plantations in Western Australia and Roadside Conservation;
• Environmental Management Systems and ecological sustainable product marketing—the Wheatbelt Region of Department of Conservation and Land Management is preparing an Environmental Management System to identify values, threats, goals and prioritise management across the landscape;
• capacity building—with State agencies, regional natural resource management groups (eg. Avon Catchment Council), Greening Australia (WA) and World Wide Fund for Nature Australia (through Woodland Watch in particular); and
• property management planning, catchment planning and Landcare and now regional natural resource management strategies under local planning instruments.

A major difficulty is finding the resources to implement this suite of plans. On-ground actions by Department of Conservation and Land Management represent a significant contribution to biodiversity conservation in the sub-region at this time.

Limiting factors

A key constraint to biodiversity conservation is the lack of capacity including knowledge and available resources. The potential for incentives does exist, however for issues such as salinity, technical solutions that are economically viable to implement are a limiting factor. Legislation pertaining to the Wildlife Conservation Act 1950 is limiting and the cost of policing legislation is prohibitive.

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