WildCountry Hub: Conservation goes continental

The Franklin Dam. Jabiluka. The Styx Valley. The Great Barrier Reef. Ningaloo. Names that bring to mind the scenes of some of Australia’s highest profile and most passionately fought conservation battles. Names that represent an approach to conservation campaigning and management that alone won’t guarantee the future. Researchers at The Australian National University are leading the charge to change the way we understand and manage Australia’s vast biodiversity. The new name to remember is WildCountry.

The WildCountry Research and Policy Hub is a major research program based at ANU and the beginning of a shift away from the conservation movement’s traditional focus on protecting discrete areas to a big picture, whole-of-continent approach. It’s a shift, according to Hub Director Professor Brendan Mackey, which will see Australia’s future approach to conservation based on the best possible scientific understanding of the connections between different regions and landscapes across the whole country.

The Hub’s name refers to the WildCountry project, an initiative of green group The Wilderness Society in Australia. The project attempts to integrate biodiversity conservation into policy and management across all land tenures, rather than simply focusing on the estimated seven per cent of the country that is in national parks.

Researchers at ANU developed a collaborative research agenda in partnership with the WildCountry Science Council, an independent scientific advisory committee to The Wilderness Society, which led to a significant ARC Linkage Grant. The industry partner for the grant is The Wilderness Society, along with the Northern Territory and South Australian governments, and Edith Cowan University. 

Shifting the focus of conservation to a continent-wide perspective is no small feat – for the scientists as much as for the activists. “One of the great challenges we face scientifically is that most conservation science has been focused on land that has already been carved up by humans,” says Mackey. “Most of the habitat has been cleared or fragmented. Scientists have been mainly focused on issues to do with the viability of threatened species in remnant patches.

“Fifty-four per cent of the continent is covered in native vegetation and is subject to grazing lease. So from a conservation point of view we need to come up with innovative alternative policies for natural resource management on half of the continent.”

Mackey says the real challenge is working out how to ensure the conservation of biodiversity in the large tracts of country that remain largely intact in the face of a range of development pressures. This is where WildCountry science developed by the Hub is entering new territory. “The existing conservation science tools were developed for the damaged parts of Australia,” says Mackey.

The inspiration for WildCountry originated in the USA with The Wildlands Project co-founded by eminent US conservation biologist Professor Michael Soulé, emeritus professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Wildlands Project aims to conserve and restore the North American continent with particular emphasis on top predators and mega fauna, such the grizzly bear. Their rationale is that if you can protect the mega fauna at the top of the food chain, which need large connected tracts of land to survive, you would have in place the building blocks needed to conserve the biodiversity of the whole continent.

While Australia is very different to the USA, with no remaining mega fauna, the researchers at the WildCountry Hub argue the same need for a scientifically based continent wide conservation strategy. “There are other scientific reasons why we need big chunks of country to stay upright,” says Mackey.

One of them relates to the dispersive nature of much Australian wildlife. About half of Australia’s bird species have the ability to travel long distances to seek out suitable climatic and vegetation conditions, making the preservation of small, unconnected, patches of land inadequate to ensuring their survival.

Another is the lack of data on the biodiversity of the vast areas of the Great Southern Woodlands in Western Australia and a large part of Northern Australia stretching from the Kimberly region in Western Australia to Cape York Peninsula in Queensland. What little data we do have suggests that Northern Australia is on the edge of an extinction crisis for a range of small mammals.

“Many animal species were formerly very widespread across Northern Australia – they no longer are and we’re not entirely sure why,” says Henry Nix, emeritus professor and former long-time director of the ANU Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, who is a chief investigator on the ARC grant and chair of the Hub’s advisory committee.

In addition to taking a new approach to conservation science, the ANU researchers are taking a new approach to collaborative research, forming a ‘hub’ rather than a conventional research centre.

Mackey says the Hub has a complex and innovative research agenda, and needs to have strategic links with key players responsible for land stewardship, including State and Federal Governments, mining and pastoral interests, and Indigenous communities. The WildCountry Hub has an expansive view of the traditional university interpretation of outreach.

Charles Tambiah, Senior Research Facilitator for the Hub, says: “The critical part of the Hub is sharing ideas and it works both ways. As part of the Hub we get to generate ideas and tools we would like to be taken up by the organisations, and at the same time, because it’s a hub, there is a two way flow of information.”

“So the Hub is also an experiment in how academics and researchers can help inject objective science into real world problem solving and policy, which is befuddled by politics and vested interests.

“I see the Hub as an experiment in terms of what a university is, what the purpose of a university is and how it interacts with society.

“The Wilderness Society and other stakeholders can take up the priorities that are developed by the Hub in terms of, for example, purchasing land, or developing a program for a particular area,” says Mackey.

In additional to NGOs such as The Wilderness Society, governments looking at their conservation and land management policies, too, will benefit from the research done by the Hub. Mackey says Australia has tended to make use of the land, and then wait 30 years to stick conservation bandaids in place to try and fix it. “Australia needs a national strategic conservation plan that reflects a long-term perspective, the implications of retaining and restoring large scale ecological processes, and is based on the best science. Policies are then needed that reflect strategic conservation priorities. It’s not our job to develop that strategy but it’s our job to provide the science to feed into it.”

The Hub’s research agenda is as wide as it is big. Work under way at the Hub includes the use of a new satellite tool to estimate plant productivity across the whole continent, a massive project using the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing supercomputer facility at ANU to analyse and classify the Australian landscape drawing upon new continental data sets, tracking of dingo behaviour using infrared video cameras to determine their role in controlling foxes and cats, engaging with Indigenous communities to trace the decline of mammals in Northern Australia, and mapping the conservation values of the Great Southern Woodlands of Western Australia.


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ANU Reporter
Winter 2006