About Communities in Landscapes
The Communities in Landscapes (CiL) project was initiated in recognition that landscape-scale change can only be achieved by working with farmers and other land managers and their communities.
The project will inform and support management decisions in Box-Gum Woodland landscapes primarily through engaging land managers and their communities in practices that have positive outcomes for production and are known to benefit resilience in Box-Gum Woodlands.
About Box-Gum Woodlands
White Box-Yellow Box-Blakely's Red Gum Grassy Woodlands and Derived Native Grasslands (Box-Gum Woodlands) are listed as a critically endangered ecological community, meaning that it is facing an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild in the immediate future. Box-Gum woodlands once dominated millions of hectares on fertile soils of the wheat-sheep belt of NSW, but have now largely been cleared for agriculture. Remnants are widely scattered, often small, on multiple land tenures and rarely managed for conservation. Box-Gum woodlands provide habitat for a range of plant and animal species threatened with extinction such as the swift parrot, superb parrot, striped legless lizard, golden sun moth and tiger quoll.
Economic and social benefits of Box-Gum Woodlands
Box-Gum woodlands provide habitat for a diverse range of plant and animal species and can contribute to a more productive farm by providing shelter for stock, pasture and crops, a seed bank for further tree and native grass regeneration on, habitat for animals that eat insect pests, and assist in the management of rising water-tables and salinity. The project focuses on three key service areas in the NSW Central West, Lachlan and Murrumbidgee landscapes:
- On-ground activities implemented across properties in six landscapes to demonstrate the value of different management practices;
- Improved knowledge base to inform and support management decisions in Box-Gum Woodland landscapes;
- Improved information and management support for land-managers and community groups.
On- ground works across multiple properties
Box-Gum Woodlands exist within a complex geographic and land-management matrix, efforts to build ecosystem resilience need to work across property boundaries to ensure practices on one property are not affecting conservation outcomes on another. To address this issue the project will develop six cross-property conservation plans with groups of 10 or more land-managers. Incentives to participate include funded training and support opportunities, connectivity plantings and access to seed-money to begin implementation.
Improved knowledge base
To assist land-managers to change their management practices information needs to address land-holder priorities and be clear about implications for their enterprise. In addition to trial sites on land-holder properties the project will promote three demonstration sites with different core management objectives where identified best-practice-management is applied, consistent with property objectives and constraints to serve as educational sites for community groups. The project will also evaluate behavior change amongst landholders to understand the effectiveness of the different engagement approaches used within and beyond the proposal. Through the benchmark survey, it will also access land-managers who have already adopted innovations that have successfully integrated production and conservation. Through both in depth interviews and on-ground measurement, it will provide data and insights into adoption pathways and the actual benefits of specific strategies.
Information and Management Support
The major threat to the resilience of Box-Gum Woodlands is the gradual degradation of sites through management actions including heavy or seasonally unsuitable grazing, fertiliser and herbicide application techniques, weed invasion and ground litter removal. Relatively simple changes have already resulted in enhanced ecosystem function in many locations, and with coordinated effort this can be extended across large extents of the Box-Gum Woodland landscape. This proposal will expand the Box-Gum Woodland information delivery network by working with project partners and other agencies with established members or clientele to ensure land-managers have access to consistent, best-management-practice advice in order to achieve best-possible outcomes for both their production enterprises and the resilience of Box-Gum Woodlands.
Links
» Grassy Box Woodlands Conservation Management Network
» Threatened Species - Superb Parrot (Polytelis swainsonii)
» Threatened Ecological Communities map (Caring for our Country)
