WA’s Great Western Woodlands is a global treasure in our backyard. It is home to more than 20% of Australia’s native plants and is an Ark for wildlife threatened elsewhere in Australia.
Among these is the community of temperate woodland birds. Birds Australia has now joined forces with The Nature Conservancy to embark on an exciting bird research and conservation project in the Great Western Woodlands.
Around the world, it is increasingly hard to find large areas of intact bush. The Great Western Woodlands, at 16 million ha in size, is the largest temperate woodland remaining on Earth. Here woodland bird communities that have suffered from habitat destruction and fragmentation elsewhere can survive and interact with an intact environment. This provides an opportunity to better understand how these bird communities function, which has implications for the management of woodlands as a whole.
The project aims to conduct systematic bird surveys, using a combination of paid project officers, skilled volunteers, and university researchers.
This information can then be used to answer all sorts of important questions such as; what does an intact woodland bird fauna look like, and how does it interact with its habitat. How do the birds use this vast area, and are some areas more important than others?
Answering these questions will provide us with a measure to assess the health of bird populations in the future, by establishing reliable baseline data. It will also help to inform critical decisions for protection and management of this unique area.
Although the Great Western Woodlands is relatively intact, currently 60% is designated Unallocated Crown Land which attracts little or no land management and only 3.6% is adequately protected. This global treasure is threatened by the cumulative impacts of frequent and intense wildfires, feral animals like foxes and rabbits, weeds, and habitat fragmentation from poorly planned infrastructure development.
Projects like this major partnership enterprise between Birds Australia and The Nature Conservancy are integral to science based landscape scale conservation and the work we are doing. The Great Western Woodlands Collaboration is working with the communities and stakeholders of the woodlands to ensure the region is better managed, protected and promoted.
You can find out more about this exciting new project by visiting the Birds Australia website www.birdsaustralia.com.au
Photos with thanks to Lochman Transparencies:
Square - tailed Kite
Malleefowl
