WildCountry Science

• WildCountry Science Council
• WildCountry Science: a new picture of the continent
• WildCountry Research Projects

WildCountry Science Council

WildCountry will be based on cutting edge conservation science. In order to develop this science and to inform the WildCountry program, The Wilderness Society has established a Science Council made up of leaders in the field of landscape and marine ecology and their disciplines.

The WildCountry Science Council currently consists of:

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  The WildCountry Science Council and Wilderness Society staff. Click for larger image.

  Emeritus Professor Michael Soulé (Co-Chair)
• Emeritus Professor Henry Nix (Co-Chair)
• Dr Joern Fischer
• Professor Richard Hobbs
• Dr Sarah Legge
• Dr Rob Lesslie
• Professor Brendan Mackey
• Professor Helene Marsh
• Dr Janet Norman
• Professor Hugh Possingham 
• Dr Regina Souter  
• Dr Trevor Ward
• Dr John Woinarski

The Science Council has published a framework paper on WildCountry terrestrial (land-based) scientific principles, and is currently leading a new discussion on marine scientific processes and their role in conservation planning.  See WildCountry Resources for a list of scientific publications.

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WildCountry Science: a new picture of the continent

WildCountry is driven by new, cutting-edge science, based on understanding the large-scale and long-term connections in nature. It aims to solve environmental problems before they occur, and restore the ecological processes and environmental flows which sustain the long-term health of nature.

To do this, first we need to better understand these ecological connections, variability in climate and environment, and availability of food and habitat, in both fragmented and intact landscapes across Australia. Then we need to develop ways of incorporating this new understanding into conservation planning at national, regional and local scales.

WildCountry science analyses environmental data in a way never before attempted in Australia. Although some scientists have focused on elements of this research, WildCountry is the first attempt to put it all together, making it particularly valuable for conservation planning. Eight processes of ecological connectivity relevent to the land have been identified, which will be integrated into environmental planning:

1. Strongly interactive species: Species that have a major impact on the habitat in which they live. For example, dingos control grazing animals such as kangaroos... Other animals, such as cassowaries and fruit-bats, pollinate flowers and disperse seeds.  

2. Hydroecology: The links between water, vegetation & wildlife, including water flows below and above the ground. For example, landclearing in Northern Australia can affect the water flows into the underground aquifers that maintain water holes in rivers during the long Dry season thus affecting wildlife a long distance from the actual area of clearing.

3. Long-distance biological movement: Animals that migrate over long distances, (nomads) spend different parts of their life in different places.  Australia ’s patchy rainfall means that around half of Australia ’s birds, for example, are non-residents and move over the landscape seeking resources.  Conserving these species may require the protection of very large areas.  

4. Disturbance regimes: Natural disturbance regimes maintain diversity in many habitats.  For example changed fire regimes can disrupt processes and connections and cause local and regional extinctions, such as the regional extinctions of birds like the Golden-shouldered Parrot in Northern Australia.  

5. Climate change & variability: Natural and human induced climate change affects species, their distributions, and their habitats. A better understanding of the likely continental-wide changes that follow climate change will allow us to plan for how best to respond.

6. Coastal zone fluxes: How catchments transport water and nutrients from inland to coastal ecosystems. For example, some fisheries produce more after flooding Wet seasons. The freshwater and the nutrients flushed from the land stimulate fish breeding and growth.

7. Maintaining evolutionary processes: Long term biological conservation must protect landscape to allow for long term changes in the range of species, and the movements of genes across land and seascapes.   For example some small areas (called refuges) in protected valleys in Tasmania and Victoria remained as temperate rainforest all through the cold, dry times of the repeated Ice Ages. The rainforest expanded out of these valleys during warmer, wetter times, and may contract again in the future.  Destruction or fragmentation of habitat, could prevent such processes.   

8. Geographic and temporal variation of plant productivity across Australia: Plant productivity is the rate at which biomass (plant material) is produced by photosynthesis. It is a key driver of biodiversity because the energy embodied in the new biomass is the basis of all terrestrial (land based) food chains; flowing through food-webs via interactions along either the ‘grazing pathway’ which initially starts with animals eating plants, or the ‘decomposition pathway’ involving bacteria, fungi and invertebrates (insects, etc).  There is significant variation in timing and location of plant productivity across the continent, and this has significant implications for conservation planning across the continent.  

An analagous set of environmental principles and process is being identified for the marine environment.  These marine processes are the key ecological factors that must be considered in conservation planning for Australia's coasts and seas.

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WildCountry Research Projects

The Wilderness Society has secured funding to enable foundational scientific work to be undertaken over the years 2004-2007.

1. The Australian National University WildCountry Research and Policy Hub (WildCountry Hub), utilizing the knowledge of the WildCountry Science Council, has been contracted to devise a scientific framework for WildCountry, establish analytical procedures and to do preliminary analysis. The major first stage of the project involved bringing together a number of spatial data sets of critical environmental and biological themes, together with data related to land cover, land use and infrastructure.

Under the leadership of Professor Brendan Mackey, the WildCountry Hub has produced a Geographic Information System (GIS) that provides hitherto unavailable access to data and analyses relevant to conservation evaluation and planning. This system is called AEGIS – the Australian Environmental Geographic Information System.
 
Spatial data are being brought together into a single computer system that have previously not been integrated and co-analysed.  For example, a new GIS database has been created of continental surface water resources, which can now be analysed in conjunction with other kinds of environmental and biological attributes.

Research Priorities for the WildCountry Hub include:

• A novel Ecological Regionalisation of Australia - a new geographic basis for conservation planning;
  
• The application of remote (that is satellite-based) sensing of landscape productivity to conservation planning;
  
• Options for promoting a conservation economy in regional Australia;
  
• The development of decision-support tools for linking users/stakeholders with geographic information systems;
  
• The conservation implications of climate change and climate variability.

2. In addition, in 2004 the Commonwealth Government awarded a substantial Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Grant to the ANU, in partnership with The Wilderness Society.  This grant funds a three year program investigating WildCountry research questions.  The projects funded under the grant are:

1. The ecological role of Dingoes as trophic (food web) regulators, and implications of this for the conservation of native animals;

2. The conservation status of native mammals in Northern Australia, utilising traditional indigneous knowledge and western science;

3. The ecology and conservation of dispersive fauna - as illustrated through the life of a nomadic rangeland bird, the Flock Bronzewing;

4. Monitoring landscape productivity and critical habitat, with a focus on SW WA's Great Western Woodland.

3. The Wilderness Society has coordinated the production of two major scientific reports on the natural values, threats to and conservation status of two significant natural areas in Australia - Northern Australia (Kimberley - Top End - Gulf Country - Cape York Peninsula) and SW Western Australia's Great Western Woodlands.  These reports have been written by Wilderness Society staff ecologists and WildCountry Science Council members, the "Nature of Northern Australia" was launched last September and the Great Western Woodlands report will be launched in early 2008.