Biodiversity Planning in Urban Fringe Landscapes

image courtesy of Ascelin Gordon

Over 40% of nationally listed threatened ecological communities occur in urban areas. Accelerating urbanisation in Australia is considered one of the greatest threats to biodiversity. This threat will increase without a more strategic approach to conservation planning in urban environments.

This research cluster addresses the critical question of how to balance the growth of our cities and towns with the preservation of our unique biodiversity.

At present, decision-making and planning in urban fringe areas is largely conducted in the absence of ecological knowledge. While complete ecological knowledge is not necessary for decision-making, there is a need to include the best available knowledge in a systematic and repeatable way to maximise the biodiversity outcomes of decisions while achieving social and economic goals. In addition, areas prioritised for restoration and revegetation should be based on best available information and a coherent strategy that considers conservation planning principles.

Our research represents the first attempt to apply and test modern systematic planning tools in the context of urban biodiversity planning.

Biodiversity Planning in Urban Fringe Landscapes is funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant (ID LP0454979)and co-funded by partner organizations:

The City of Whittlesea

Department of Sustainability and the Environment

Hume City Council

Port Phillip and Western Port Catchment Management Authority

Stockland

Project Collaborators:

- Dr Sarah Bekessy (RMIT University)

- Dr Mick McCarthy (The University of Melbourne)

- Dr Brendan Wintle (The University of Melbourne)

- Dr Josh Dorrough (Department of Sustainability and Environment)

Choose a link below for more information on the research being conducted:

Project Descriptions:

The individual research projects nested within this cluster include:

Frameworks for assessing the persistence of biodiversity in urban fringe areas

Researcher: Dr. Ascelin Gordon

Ascelin is currently reviewing the methods used to determine the viability of the biodiversity in a given region. Much progress has been made in modelling individual populations of rare and threatened species, to determine the important factors in ensuring the persistence of the species. However conserving the biodiversity of a region ideally requires tools to be able to assess the persistence of entire communities, not just single species. Generalising these single-species models to deal with entire communities is both time and labour intensive requiring extensive modelling expertise and unfeasible mounts of data. Many possible approaches have been suggested to deal with this problem. Some alternative approaches include; the use of focal species, where a small number of surrogate species that are deemed to incorporate the needs of a wider range of biodiversity; using the distribution of habitat and its fragmentation as a surrogate biodiversity As well as reviewing the currents approaches for assessing biodiversity viability, Ascelin will assess which techniques (or combinations of techniques) will be useful to apply to this project. This is the first step development of tools used to optimise the trade-off between biodiversity values and competing land uses in the urban fringe.

Prioritizing actions within offset/mitigation policies through credit assignment under uncertainty

Researcher: Dr. Bill Langford

Bill is examining the implications of uncertainties in biodiversity offset/mitigation policies such as the Habitat Hectares (HH) approach to native vegetation assessment and the Victoria state government Net Gain policy regarding land clearing. Developing these kinds of environmental policies is complicated by large uncertainties in each step of the process (e.g., detection probabilities for endangered species, restoration success, etc.). Bill is modeling the process as a sequence of abstract actions: i) screening for endangered species, ii) assessing habitat values, iii) choosing offsets/mitigation, iv) restoration, and v) protection of offset. Then, given numerous uncertainties within each step, the model is used to determine the relative contribution of the various pieces under specific political and economic environments with unknown degrees of uncertainty. Uncertainties and outcomes in each step are modeled by increasing/decreasing species persistence probabilities as a common currency among all actions. Bill is working on identifying partitions of the uncertainty space and using infogap analysis to provide guidance on which steps in policy demand particular emphasis under what classes of uncertainties and background conditions.

Investigating the techniques used to conduct flora surveys for biodiversity monitoring or environmental impact assessments

Researcher: Georgia Garrard

Georgia is interested in investigating the techniques used to conduct flora surveys for biodiversity monitoring or environmental impact assessments. She is particularly interested in the detectability of plant species during such surveys, especially that of rare species. Under the EPBC Act, there are currently no standards set for biodiversity surveys or the effort that the surveyor must go to ensure that all species are detected during an environmental impact assessment. The development of such standards would help ecologists, planners and developers make transparent and informed decisions about which areas should be conserved for their biodiversity value.

Undertaking a dynamic landscape model for the Southern Brown Bandicoot

Researcher: Alex Lechner

The Southern Brown Bandicoot is listed as Endangered on the NSW Threatened Species Conservation Act 1995 and Endangered on the Commonwealth Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.

Key factors thought responsible for the decline of I. obesulus across parts of its historical range include; predation by feral carnivores; habitat loss; inappropriate fire regimes leading to degradation of habitat; Road-kill from vehicular traffic may also be impacting upon some populations of the species.

The long-term viability of the species in the wild is made more tenuous by its patchy distribution and the consequent potential for localised population extinction. Alex will undertake a population modelling technique for the Bandicoot that incorporates changes in the landscape. This will help assess the relative impact of the threats facing the I. obesulus and also help determine which management actions will have greatest effect in decreasing the risk of extinction for the I. obesulus. This work is relevant to the project as it is an important extension of the techniques used to model the populations of threatened species.

Project Outputs:

Conference Presentations

DIVERSITAS Open Science Conference, Oaxaca, Mexico, 11 November 2005.

Ascelin Gordon, ‘Biodiversity Viability Assessment in the Urban Fringe of Melbourne’, (pdf; 2.0M)

Ecological Society of Australia Conference 2005, 29th November - 2nd December 2005, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane.

Ascelin Gordon, ‘Combining Approaches to Multi-Species Viability Assessment’ (pdf; 2.1M)

Georgia Garrard, ‘When have we looked hard enough? Incorporating plant detectability and sampling effort into threatened species legislation’ (pdf; 161K)

Bill Langford, ‘Improving Offset Policies Through Modeling As Sequential Reserve Selection’ (pdf; 56K)

Project Affiliations:

Biodiversity Planning in Urban Fringe Landscapes is affiliated with several other research projects including:

Landscape Futures Alliance – A research group of 15 leading scientists and managers from Universities and State Government Departments who have joined forces to significantly improve decision making and target setting in rural and urban-fringe landscapes and to improve cost effectiveness of efforts to restore ecological function to degraded land.

Our Rural Landscape– in partnership with the Victorian Department of Primary Industries and the Department of Sustainability and Environment, this project will develop innovative technologies for the sustainable development of Victoria’s food and agricultural sector.

Change and Continuity in Peri-Urban Australia – funded by Land and Water Australia, this project involves an examination of factors affecting land use change on peri-urban land around two major Australian cities, Melbourne and Brisbane, and two regional urban areas and their hinterlands, the Bendigo region and the Gold Coast. It will examine trends, impacts, potential changes in land uses, responses, and adequacy of responses to deal with expected changes, for these areas.