Building Relationships for Healthy Ecosystems: Five years of Woodland Watch
WWF-Australia's Woodland Watch Project Officer, Mick Davis with Wheatbelt farmer David Graham
© Darren Jew
One of WWF-Australia's most innovative conservation initiatives - Woodland Watch - is turning five this year. To mark this important milestone WWF conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the scientific outputs, conservation outcomes and social impacts of this flagship project.
Initiated by WWF in 2000, Woodland Watch is a field-based conservation program that helps communities in rural Australia protect and manage threatened eucalypt woodlands on private and non-State managed lands. Initially focusing on the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia, part of the Southwest Australia Ecoregion, the project aims to preserve biodiversity within this global biodiversity hotspot.
For the past five years, WWF has been working with landholders scattered across WA's vast Wheatbelt, as well as the Avon Catchment Council, the Northern Agricultural Catchment Council, various local Shire Councils, the CALM Western Australian Herbarium, Greening Australia and the covenanting service providers with the Department of Conservation and Land Management and the National Trust of Australia (Western Australia).
Building on past relationships with these many landholders, local shires and community groups, and through key partnerships with regional NRM bodies, the Woodland Watch model is influencing the way native vegetation conservation incentive frameworks are being developed.
In the Avon Wheatbelt, Woodland Watch is poised to evolve into a more comprehensive delivery program called 'Healthy Ecosystems'. In this new framework WWF will continue as a key innovator in NRM service delivery and will maintain solid relationships with private landholders and other NRM practitioners to further our conservation objectives on the ground.
"By protecting and preserving their woodlands, rural communities can help stop the fragmentation of habitat; a major threat to native species in Australia" says Senior Project Manager Native Vegetation, Chris Curnow.
"Woodland Watch also aims to increase public awareness of the incredible variety of woodland types and their distribution patterns throughout the Wheatbelt."
Snapshot: What Woodland Watch Does & What Healthy Ecosystems Will Do
- Facilitating the uptake of voluntary native vegetation conservation management agreements by landholders, land managers and shires to help manage their bushland for conservation.
- Undertaking flora surveys on private land, including recording as yet undocumented biodiversity, and encouraging landholders and land managers to understand the role of biodiversity on farms and beyond. The flora survey data can be accessed on CALM's Florabase.
- Reporting potential threatened ecological communities, rare and endangered plants, or new species discovered.
- Promoting and ensuring the scientific vouchering of the floristic diversity of WA's Wheatbelt woodlands, including the full documentation of rare and endangered plants, range extensions of known species and the discovery of new species in collaboration with the WA Herbarium.
- Providing on-ground technical advice on topics such as bush habitat health assessment and weed control.
The report on the social and scientific impacts of Woodland Watch, as well as its conservation outcomes will be available soon on wwf.org.au. The Woodland Watch Overview: 2000-2005 and Private Bush Management in the Western Australian Wheatbelt - Scientific, Conservation and Social Outcomes publications provide an interim overview of the project's outcomes between 2000 and 2005.
For more information, visit the Woodland Watch project page.
BioBlitz
As part of its ongoing endeavours to ensure that the biodiversity wonders of the Wheatbelt are increasingly valued, Woodland Watch staff have run an annual BioBlitz each year from 2002 to 2004. The events were run in conjunction with a local government authority, with a view to providing that local shire with biodiversity information and to assist them develop a management plan for the shire-managed reserve.
The BioBlitz event attracted people from the city and from the surrounding rural communities to volunteer and discover all manner of living things in a single Wheatbelt remnant. You can download the results of these inspirational and fun events for each year: 2002 Lake McDermott, 2003 Moningarin and 2004 Kununoppin).
