Scoping climate-ready management of Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub in Queens Park, Sydney

[摘要] This report describes an analysis, conducted using the Climate-ready biodiversity management tool, of an endangered ecological community in an urban setting that is vulnerable to climate change. It then presents a case for a new style of project that specifically seeks to drive learning across different groups in society, to evolve preferences, stimulate changes in rules and create new understanding, that in turn enables new options for managing the site, the ecological community more generally, and indeed other threatened ecological communities in the face of climate change.Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub (ESBS) is a very restricted endangered ecological community (EEC), occurring in several remnants in Sydney’s east, including in Queens Park, adjacent to Centennial Park. The ESBS community only occurs on a highly restricted soil type, although most of the species typical of ESBS are much more widespread. Conservation concern for ESBS, like many restoration projects Australia-wide, revolves around maintaining the local provenances (varieties) that occur on, and are presumably adapted to, the local soil type. As well as being a remnant of an EEC, the site is valued by the community in a wide range of ways connected to different aspects of its naturalness. Climate change in combination with existing site factors may make the current restoration objective hard to achieve and maintain in the long term. However, the analysis revealed that it may be quite feasible to maintain most of the other societal values for the site even in the face of significant climate-driven ecological changes. This potentially includes maintaining a community of ESBS species, if not of local provenances. However, achieving all of these objectives, including the non-local provenances of ESBS species, would require a series of changes in management of the site. The analysis identified multiple potential barriers to change, spanning values, rules and knowledge. These include, for example, key questions such as what would or should the legal status of the site be if it were no longer dominated by naturally occurring local provenances of ESBS species? What if it became dominated by other native species? Importantly, the analysis identified that the potential barriers arise from many different sources, including the land management agencies, State government, management contractors, the professional bush regeneration community, local conservation volunteers, residents, and the ecological research community. The analysis then scoped a series of small scale experimental interventions that could readily be trialled by the current managers with targeted partners, selected due to their connection to potential barriers. These interventions were designed to stimulate specific learning to address key barriers that stakeholders and managers might experience in the future as they decide how to manage ESBS at this and other sites. Furthermore, addressing these barriers for ESBS will help stimulate changes in values, rules and knowledge needed to create options for other EECs across NSW and Australia in the face of significant climate change.

[发布日期] 2017-12-19 [发布机构] CSIRO

[效力级别] Environment Policy [学科分类] 地球科学(综合)