Landscape Connectivity – Be Strategic and Think Outside the Corridor
Posted on 17 April, 2013 by Connecting Country
Over 60 people recently attended a talk titled Designing a Wildlife Corridor: What Works & Why? at the Elphinstone Community Hall.
The first speaker, Dr Rodney van der Ree, wasted no time in subverting the title of the evening to reflect his thoughts on designing wildlife corridors – changing the title of his talk from ‘Designing a Wildlife Corridor…’ to Designing a Connected Landscape…’! Rodney’s point was that what we are aiming for when we create wildlife corridors is really ‘landscape connectivity’ – and wildlife corridors are only one part of this. Other landscape features such as patches of remnant vegetation, paddock trees, small clumps of vegetation, scattered trees and stags can all form part of a connected landscape.
His talk went on to detail many ways by which the effectiveness of a corridor can be maximised, including trying to incorporate established vegetation into a corridor; making use of linear landscape features such as roads and creeks; designing with a particular animal or group of animals in mind and planning strategically – look at a map!
The second part of Rodney’s talk was about his research into the effectiveness of wildlife crossings over the Hume and Calder freeways. Rodney showed a number of photographs from cameras placed at the entrances to wildlife underpasses. They had captured all sorts of animals, including echidnas, koalas, kangaroos, foxes – and a dirt bike rider. Photographs from the arboreal rope bridges were also fascinating and included one quite unexpected tight-rope-walker making its way over the Hume Freeway – a goanna!
Despite the great images of animals using the crossings, Rodney’s data (which began from the beginning of construction) showed that there was an overall and continuing population decline in numbers of arboreal marsupials living adjacent to the new freeway over time.
Dr Rodney van der Ree answers an audience members question.
The second speakers were from the Superb Parrot Project – a landscape-scale revegetation project which has been helping landholders to create wildlife corridors in the Picola area of northern Victoria for over 20 years – with great benefits to the Superb Parrot and other wildlife in the area. Sue Logie, who coordinated the project for 13 years, said that the project has maintained its momentum because they “do things”; in a farming area people weren’t too interested in coming to meetings but they were great at getting out there and planting trees – especially if there was a piece of machinery to tinker with. The group was even lucky enough to include an engineer who designed a special tree planting machine for the work.
The story of the Superb Parrot Project was a real inspiration and showed how much can be achieved when people really get behind an idea.
The evening was jointly presented by Connecting Country and the North Central CMA. We would like to thank everybody that came along, as well as Castlemaine Abundance Kitchen Enterprise (CAKE) for putting on another delicious supper.
On the 17th of November this year there is an opportunity for everyone to help the Superb Parrot Project by taking part in the Annual Superb Parrot Count. Click here for more details.
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