What are Conservation Management Networks

A CMN is a network of sites with native vegetation. A CMN is also a network of people who work together to protect and restore these sites, and also work to expand and link them across the landscape. Members of a CMN include interested private landholders, managers of remnant vegetation on public land, and other interested community members.The people in a CMN focus on a local ecological community – or a group of plants and animals that coexist in nature – such as rainforest, native grassland or woodland. Members work to protect threatened species like the endangered Bush Stonecurlew, Striped Legless Lizard, Malleefowl, and the vulnerable Powerful Owl.
Australia is one of the most biologically diverse countries in the world. Most of our native plants and animals only occur here, and many of these are found on private land.CMNs are busy on both public and private land with site-based activities like revegetation, and addressing landscape-wide problems like tree die-back, weeds and foxes. Community education is also an important CMN activity. The community has a strong say in deciding the activities of the CMN.

CMNs work closely with local Landcare, government agencies and nongovernment organizations.
Nature doesn’t know the difference between public and privately-owned land, so conserving biodiversity needs cooperation between private landholders, public agencies and the broader community. In Australia, Conservation Management Networks (CMNs) have been used since the mid-1990s as an effective way to bring these groups together.
This description of CMN`s has been quoted from the Department of Sustainability and Environment, Victoria, Australia.

The Malleefowl - Flagship Species of the Wedderburn CMN

The malleefowl Leipoa ocellata is found exclusively on mainland Australia and is a member of the megapode family. Megapodes are unique in the world. They do not use their body heat to incubate the eggs like most other birds; rather, the eggs are buried in a mound then incubated by external heat sources. Malleefowl use the heat generated by decomposing leaf litter and the sun to heat their mounds, and constantly manipulate the soil depth and mound shape to regulate the temperature. Amazingly, despite a wide range of day and night temperatures over the seasons, malleefowl are able to keep their egg chambers at a constant temperature.The malleefowl is listed as a nationally endangered species in Australia.

The Weather and the Malleefowl – Peter Watts
Like the farmers they like an early break in the weather to commence their nest preparation for the breeding season. In a good year i.e. May or June break in the weather they will dig out a mound and start scratching up material for a nest, later to be scratched into the mound which is completed in September. This year (2008) the two pairs of malleefowls found in the Wychitella area only started scratching up material a few days before the break in early August, very late. But this activity is needed for there has been very few eggs laid in the last eight years, in some of these years none.

The Focus Area of the Wedderburn Conservation Management Network

The Wedderburn CMN’s focus area is of high conservation value with more than 25% vegetation cover in the Wedderburn/Wychitella area. There are also large areas of cleared and semi-cleared land with scattered blocks of bush and remnant vegetation on public and private land. It is a highly fragmented landscape caused by past land clearing for agriculture, mining, eucalyptus oil production and subdivision for housing. The focus covers an area of approximately 170,000 ha between the townships of Wedderburn and Wychitella, in the North Central Catchment area of the state of Victoria, Australia (see Map). The area includes fragmented public land blocks and freehold properties important for conservation of Box-Ironbark forests and woodlands. Members of the Wedderburn CMN were instrumental in the purchase of the 245 ha Nardoo Hills Reserve by Bush Heritage Australia, Australia’s largest nonprofit private land conservation organisation.

Koorong Bushland Reserve - Wendy Murphy, Wedderburn CMN Ranger

The Koorong Bushland Reserve is located on the corner of the Calder Highway and Roberts Rd almost opposite to Mt Korong. It is only just over 4 Ha in size, but is of great significance in the surrounding fragmented landscape. It is a very important representative of the Plains Woodland (endangered) / Grassy Woodland (vulnerable) vegetation community. It has unsurpassed ground layer quality with very few weeds and high species diversity. It has particularly good populations of Arthropodium fimbiratum, or the Nodding Chocolate-lily, but I guess most concern for the Wedderburn CMN is the plantings of the nationally threatened Olearia pannossa spp cardiophylla, or the Velvet-daisy Bush - see photograph top right. There is only one known plant of this species in the whole Wedderburn CMN area, which is found a short distance away.
In early December of last year, road works were occurring along a vast stretch of the Calder Highway between Wedderburn and Inglewood. Unfortunately Vic Roads made a mistake in writing out their open stack site numbers in the contract, (where road base and screenings are stored before use), which caused their contractors to use the Koorong Bushland Reserve. This site has been closed for many, many years, but was used by heavy machinery and trucks over a period of about a week. This caused severe compaction of the area where the screenings were placed and also damage to some of the surrounding vegetation. Fortunately though, none of the Velvet-daisy Bush plantings were harmed.

But due to Vic Roads’ error in writing the contract, they were willing to survey the damage and assist in repairing any damage.
In March I organised a meeting between their two Environmental Officers, Jade Logie of Parks Victoria Inglewood and myself. After discussing our concerns and what we would like seen done, Vic Roads agreed to pay for the ripping of the damaged area and to revegetate it. It was hoped that they may also pay to fence the Reserve, but they didn’t feel that was necessary. So in the near future you will see works being done in this small, seemingly insignificant patch of bush, probably one you have never taken much notice of before, but hopefully now that you know of its importance you will look at it in a whole new light.
Thanks must go to Richard Goonan of DSE, David Martin and Jade Logie of Parks Victoria and the Vic Roads representatives for their time and input into this situation.

Melbourne volunteers at the Nardoo Hills - Jeroen van Veen

With winter approaching, so do busier times at our area’s reserves. Not only do the native plants and animals spring to life once (or should that read “if”?) the rains arrive, so do the rabbits and the weeds. Rabbits start breeding as soon as there are the first green shoots on the ground and weeds pop up quicker than many of the natives.
At the Bush Heritage reserve in the Nardoo Hills there is one big extra weapon in the fight against the weeds: Volunteers. Bush Heritage Australia recruits volunteers for many of its reserves nationwide. They have an extensive list of members who contribute through regular fees and donations, but also through labour. At the more remote and larger reserves in outback Queensland or Western Australia volunteers usually work in small teams for spells of a week or longer, but at the Nardoo Hills the arranged volunteer weekends are usually two days, with an early finish on Sunday so people can still make it back home comfortably.
This year there will be six volunteer weekends with all of them booked out well in advance. The Nardoo Hills reserve is a popular destination for Bush Heritage volunteers as it is one of the few reserves within one day’s drive from Melbourne, where most come from. The main jobs they will be engaged in is weed control (Patterson’s Curse, Wheel Cactus and Horehound), fence maintenance, wildlife monitoring and tree planting, but the team supervisor makes sure there is also some time for a bit of bird or wildflower watching.
The first of this winter’s weekends will be at the end of April. The managers of the Nardoo Hills reserve are looking forward to welcoming these hard workers back for another season. Without them the task of bringing some of the runaway weeds under control would be so much harder. Also, some of the volunteers have been coming back for quite a number of years now and it is good catching up.

Ecological Thinning – Peter Morison

A trial research project involving ecological thinning of mallee is soon to happen on private property on the Old Boort Rd. The aim is to improve the quality of the vegetation by allowing understorey species to grow. Many mallee areas that were formerly cleared have regrown as pure eucalypt stands with no understorey present - see photograph. The absence of understorey plants reduces the value of the bushland to fauna species such as malleefowl. Ecological thinning in this case involves the cutting and poisoning of some of the mallee resulting in a reduction or thinning of the mallee thus allowing space for understory plants to come through.

Flora and Fauna Survey at Mt Korong – Michael Moore

Students from a Melbourne TAFE college carried out a flora and fauna study at a property in the Mt Korong region recently purchased by the company Greenhouse Balanced. The company is in the process of revegetating the landscape of the property with various species of trees and shrubs native to the area. In carrying out this valuable work the company aims to contribute to the sequestration of carbon from the atmosphere and simultaneously enhance the environment to ensure the future of the various species which inhabit the area. An important aspect of conserving biodiversity is finding out which species actually do inhabit an area in question, hence the study. The study resulted in amongst other things the capture and photographing of various species of bats as shown. The bats are ,from left to right: the little forest bat, the lesser long eared bat and Gould`s wattled bat.

Photographs by Jeroen Van Veen