Blink and you’ll miss it- Biodiversity on the brink

Biodiversity month just finished…did you notice? Held in September each year to focus on the variety of all living things it was a blink in the calendar of life. You can make the memory last though. The CPPA has started an iNaturalist project, https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/projects/coal-point-landcare to collect and share images of the wonderful wildlife that surrounds us. Inaturalist is easy to use. You can download the app and when you see something you know or don’t know, take a picture and the team of specialist behind the scenes will assist in identifying your discovery. 

We can’t protect what we can’t see, love it or lose it. Recently the Department of Environment and Heritage produced the NSW Biodiversity Outlook Report 2024.

There were several key findings in the report:

• only 50% of threatened species are expected to survive the next 100 years
• only 29% of the capacity of habitat to support native species remains
• past habitat loss and future climate change will significantly reduce the capacity of landscapes to retain biodiversity over the next 50 years
• for the first time, land permanently secured for conservation has exceeded 10% of the state, increasing from 8.6% in 2007 to 11.2% in 2023.

It’s no secret the CPPA’s focus over the past few decades has been on protecting and preserving the local environment. Long-term locals can recall a time when little birds, like pardalotes, use to flit through the abundant bushland understorey, the chorus of frogs resonated after rain, blue-tongue lizards were about, the foreshore didn’t need fortification and big trees provided hollow-homes for parrots, possums, squirrel gliders, sugar gliders and microbats.  

More recently locals have been witnessing the fragmentation of our biodiverse bushland through sub-division and larger building footprints, the loss of small birds and ground dwelling animals as uncontrolled cats and the odd fox roam at night and kill, the smothering of the relatively fragile native flora as robust exotic plants and grasses are dumped into local reserves, the incursion of possums into roof spaces as their hollow bearing trees are felled, and the disappearance of canopy connectivity that allows the local wildlife to navigate space but also provides shade, shelter and the backdrop of our bigger bushland backyard.

We know a fair bit about our local biodiversity. From 2012 to 2018 the CPPA completed a $1million project, Threatened Species Last Stand (TSLS), on the Coal Point peninsula. There were many great outcomes from that project. There was a successful environmental burn, which you can read about as part of the journal Ecological Management & Restoration .The Landcare activity around our 12 local reserves trebled and allowed the landcare team to get the upper hand on many of the long-term weed incursions. There was a shift in the recovery trajectory of the reserves and in the capacity of the landcarers from despair to hope. Flora and bird surveys were regularly undertaken and for the first time threatened species were formally identified; the very cute Squirrel Glider, the ever graceful plant, Tetratheca juncea, and the majestic Powerful Owl. During this period Council undertook plans of management for these three threatened species and noted both their presence and the tenuous nature of their existence on the Coal Point peninsula due to the isolated nature of the populations in an increasingly fragmented bushland.

Another major finding from the TSLS project was that, because of the mosaic of public-private land along the bush-dominated ridge tops and the dearth of public land along the foreshore mid-slopes, unless private landholders also do their bit to support the local wildlife and the bushland it depends upon, our public reserves run the risk of becoming little more than silent islands of isolation and uniformity. In addition, options for wildlife dispersal on a peninsula are somewhat constrained by being surrounded by water.

Retaining our local biodiversity requires a multi-pronged approach involving boosting the options that are available for wildlife and their habitat on public and private land, whilst ensuring that future housing models do not further fragment and destroy the basic integrity and connectivity of the bushland that remains.