Living on the Edge
Living on the Edge
Landholder engagement to manage introduced species on the edges of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area
Local Links - Stronger Communities -
LLCI002-010
The issue
The Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area (GBMWHA) covers more than one million hectares of unique landscapes that represent Australia’s distinctive eucalypt vegetation and its associated communities. Surrounded by private and public landholdings, the GBMWHA is an area of plateaus, cliffs, inaccessible canyons and remote wilderness.
The occurrence of invasive pest plant and animal species from surrounding and adjacent urban and rural areas is a significant threat to its world heritage values.
The successful management to help mitigate those pressures is a challenge for all land managers - requiring a collaborated and integrated approach.
The solution
The ‘Living on the Edge’ project was developed by the Central Tablelands Local Land Services in conjunction with local stakeholders. The first year of this five-year funded project has focussed on preliminary landholder engagement. Activities to date include:
- Five landholder workshops throughout the Lithgow and Oberon Local Government Areas
- Compilation of landholder weed and pest animal surveys
- Four comprehensive pest animal studies in key localities using wildlife cameras
- Three weed mapping exercises using aerial imagery and on-ground surveys
The impact
To date, 82 landholders have attended workshops across the region, with 35 already taking up the active management of monitoring and managing pest weed and animal species on their properties.
The data gathered from pest weed and animal surveys has been compiled to form baseline data for the project which will feed into future and ongoing monitoring and management works.
Learnings
Landholder engagement is essential to effectively manage invasive pest weed and animal species. This requires a commitment from landholders, local and state government agencies to participate in programs that result in multi-disciplinary approaches across all lands, regardless of tenure. Maintaining this level of sustained engagement is a key to its long term success.
Key facts
- Managing weeds and pest animals in and around the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area requires collaboration.
- All landholders, public and private, need to be engaged.
- Providing tools, information and training enables genuine engagement and collaborative action.