Habitat restoration is a long-distance job. There are three groups that I endure

Like ferns and tides, community conservation groups come. Many people are achieving their goals. Volunteers will either restore local wetlands or protect patches of city bushes and hang gardening gloves with a warm inner glow. Some groups endure while tackling the ecological issues facing Australia today, kicking out others.

One of these problems is fragmentation. Let’s say there’s a national park in one place and most of its habitat is 10 km away. It is too difficult to build across open ground for many wildlife species to get there. Over time, this means that wild areas will effectively become islands.

This is where the hallways appear. Potentially, restoring habitat between two isolated areas allows wildlife to begin safely moving between the two. Over time, these corridors allow seeds, pollen, native birds and animals to be dispersed in today’s landscape.

In my work as a restoration ecologist, I came across many Australian community groups dedicated to the work. Three of these are Rocchia Upland Leccon Inc., which began in 2015, and Lucia Upland Leccon Inc., which was founded in 1993 and started in 1982. This is Rush. Each of these had a distance. Here are a few reasons.

Where do you need the wildlife corridor most?

Australia’s wet tropical areas are especially threatened by fragmentation. The region is a World Heritage Site listed for its incredible biodiversity. Tropical forests have grown here for at least 130 million years. Fragmentation directly threatens this.

There are three popular national parks in the tropical highlands of Tablelands in Atherton. Crater Lake and curtain fig tree in Saem and Valin. But while visitors may consider them untouched, each of them is an island surrounded by meadows and settlements. Over time, this will hit the seeds inside.

Maintain the course

Three things are needed for volunteer groups to reverse the impact of fragmentation and embark on such a long-term project.

First, this group commits leadership to long-term causes, usually scientists and naturalists, as well as knowledgeable and motivated locals. Leaders need to be able to work with all persuasive governments and group members.

Second, groups must be guided by science. Current information about local plants, animals and habitats is required.

And thirdly, networking skills. It is essential to leverage the technical expertise of other groups, governments and experts in planning, execution and monitoring projects.

Each of these three groups has these characteristics, despite taking a different approach to the challenge.

Luci is an alliance of private landowners in Queensland’s Locker Valley, west of Brisbane, working to protect the remaining vegetation and expand its habitat. Their work on surveillance of threatened species, conserving remaining vegetation on private land, and engaging in the community reflects an emphasis on education.

Before the European settlement, the lowland subtropical rainforest covered 75,000 hectares of land in the hinterlands of what is now Byron Bay. However, 99% has been reduced. In response, Big Scrub members repotted approximately 600 hectares of discarding the size of what remains, establishing an innovative genetics programme that helps maintain and strengthen the gene pool of planted trees.

The treat is based in Atherton Tablelands in northern Queensland. The area has long been respected by agriculture that sacrifices its habitat. In response, Treat has worked to reconnect isolated areas of the rainforest. The group works with Queensland parks and wildlife to grow thousands of native rainforest tree saplings each year.

All three groups recognize the importance of countering habitat fragmentation. This slice and dicing forest grows into smaller, isolated patches, seriously threatening Australia’s biodiversity.

Wildlife corridors are, in theory, seemingly simple. But as we know from our long experience of restoring habitat, it’s more difficult than it looks.

Will it work?

The planting corridor sounds like a certainty. However, success is not guaranteed. For one thing, it takes work and time. Ideally, a decades of baseline research, data and surveillance expert analysis would be required. Given these challenges, it is not surprising that wildlife corridor restorations have been hardly studied.

In the 1990s, treat volunteers planted 17,000 trees and reconnected 498 hectares of fragments around Lake Barine to the 80,000 hectares of Oolong Oran National Park, 1.2 km away. This corridor is now over 20 years old. It is known as the natural shelter in Donaghee’s corridor, following the Donaghee family, who donated land to restore Donaghee’s corridors.

My research has shown that this corridor is a success. Ground mammals migrate along the corridors and are breeding. This could be seen in gene exchanges between two previously isolated populations of native bush rats (Rattus Fuscipes).

More recent studies have shown that corridors are colonized by many species, ranging from endemic plants that are threatened to birds, terrestrial mammals, reptiles, amphibians and microorganisms. It’s promising, but this is just one corridor. More data is needed to prove that this approach is broad and effective.

As habitat fragmentation continues and the effects of climate change increase, more and more species will need to migrate. The work of volunteer groups such as Luci, Big Scrubs and Treats in reconnecting scattered habitats will only become more important.

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