Delivery of the Caring for Our Country funded Healthy Bushland Baselevel project this year continues to support conservtion works in the Avon, including:
- celebration of the community protection of Kennedy Reserve in Cunderdin with a second conservation covenant;
- landscape scale revegetation works and community planning in the Lockhart sub-catchment;
- monitoring of threatened wallaby populations living on granite outcrops, and
- fencing of priority vegetation types in the avon wheatbelt IBRA region, and
- the Korrelocking BioBlitz - a 24hr citizen science spring survey.
2011
Ongoing project work under the Healthy Bushland Baselevel project has seen:
- populations of reptiles relocated and monitored;
- video monitoring of threatened malleefowl in the northeastern wheatbelt;
- continuation of the Red Card for the Red Fox program;
- provision of management and conservation advice to multiple stakeholders, and
- improved management of over 2500ha remnant vegetation across the Avon region.
2010
As a response to the Australian Government's Caring For Our Country (CFOC) program, Wheatbelt NRM developed a proposal that addressed a number of CFOC Business Plan targets including the increase in size of the National Reserve System (NRS) target.
Activities addressing this target have been addressed within Wheatbelt NRM’s ‘National Reserve System and Biodiversity Conservation’ program. This program was made up of 4 projects, including this project – Healthy Bushland Baselevel.
The Healthy Bushland Baselevel project aimed to increase the area of land protected by conservation covenants in the Avon Wheatbelt and the Mallee Region (the ARB portion of the Avon Wheatbelt bioregions and Western Mallee sub-bioregion).
This goal was achieved by working with private land managers to identify and protect priority remnant bushland, using conservation covenants to identify management requirements.
Landholders were supported to develop management plans and incentives were available to assist in implementing the management plans. The project targeted existing protected areas to improve the management of these areas to meet NRS standards and targeted new locations identified using a Strategic Conservation Planning tool which is currently under development.
For more information about this project contact Rowan Hegglun, Biodiversity Program Manager, at rhegglun@wheatbeltnrm.org.au
