Increasing urbanisation brings increasing pressures on our precious native wildlife. Here on the Sunshine Coast, the landscape from our floodplains to our forests has been heavily fragmented pushing wildlife into fast diminishing habitat.
It's critical the hard-fought for National Parks, State Forests and conservation areas are connected to remaining bushland, wetlands, waterways and core habitat areas to provide corridors for wildlife to move through, over, under and across areas of viable habitat safely to forage, breed and to be...wild! Compounded by the impacts of climate change, fauna need functional and extensive corridors to support their survival and to help address the alarming extinction trajectory of too many species, including the iconic koala which has been Federally up-listed to endangered. This is a shocking indictment of Australia's appalling track-record for conservation of our unique flora and fauna and natural heritage
So it's time to do all possible to turn this unacceptable state of the environment around by getting better outcomes from infrastructure projects and land-use planning by identifying and protecting wildlife corridors before we lose any more opportunities for connectivity.
That's why, back in 1999-2000, SCEC produced The Habitat 2000 Wildlife Corridors Report - an innovative and cutting-edge project to identify priority wildlife corridors initially in the Caloundra City Council area. This underpinning work and resulting document was instrumental in determining which areas contained high conservation and habitat values and formed critical corridors in an effort to enhance and preserve them in the face of rampant development and escalating development pressures.
Twenty-two years on, this work is still relevant as we continue to see where corridors have been established and opportunities to secure links to conservation areas before they are lost.
SCEC is progressing work on an updated, contemporary version with our Habitat 2022-2032 project currently underway. More on this and opportunities to collaborate and contribute coming soon!
Right now, we're fighting to save a 129ha portion of Beerwah State Forest from being logged. Catch up on the Save Ferny Forest campaign here
Take a closer look at the wildlife corridor to link the Mooloolah River NP-Meridan Plains section and Ferny Forest