Threatened plants tend to receive less attention than threatened animals and, while work to recover them is ongoing, there’s a serious risk that further
declines could go unnoticed until it’s too late.
Associate Professor Rod Fensham knows that some plant species are more at
risk of sudden extinction than others, and his challenge is to identify which are most at risk and which can be saved.
“A plant species that could go extinct rapidly is basically one that is restricted to one or two small fragmented populations, and these populations
are destroyed through habitat destruction, disease or an event such as fire,” says Associate Professor Rod Fensham from the University of Queensland.
Professor Fensham leads the TSR Hub’s Project 2.4, which has been tasked with developing a Red Hot List for Australia's most imperiled plants.
This will serve as an early-warning tool to alert managers of at-risk species and provide information to enact on-ground conservation efforts.
“Red Hot species will be rare and restricted, declining or at demonstrated risk, distinct/unique, and often with high cultural values and/or flagship
potential,” says Jennifer Silcock, who will be engaging with communities around Australia to compile the list.
“There must also be identifiable and achievable recovery actions that we know we can use to prevent their extinction.”
“These may be threatened ground orchids, coastal heath plants in rapidly-urbanising south east Queensland, and species found in desert springs which
are under threat.”
Another example is South-western Western Australia species that have declined due Phytophthora water mould dieback, such as Banksia brownii, Banksia montana, Banksia pseudoplumosa.
“We know that we have to develop this tool as quickly as possible, because there’s a risk that some species could go extinct before its completion.
To make sure that doesn’t happen, we’re involving a wide range of experts,” says Associate Professor Fensham.
Researchers will review the current threatened species lists – national, state and territory - and investigate the threats that put these species at
risk of extinction.
Special consideration will be given to plants of importance to the community, as well as those that are unique or are associated with threatened habitats.
The complete Red Hot flora list, along with conservation profiles and recommended management actions to provide for their recovery, will be accessible
online from December 2017.
“We expect to see positive outcomes shortly after producing the list. Managers will have a clear sense of which species to focus on, identifying and
prioritising conservation management actions to reduce the likelihood of extinction,” says Associate Professor Fensham.
The Red Hot List will provide advice to slow declines, avert extinctions and promote species recovery.
The work that’s gone into this research will be useful for many years to come. The investigations into the vulnerabilities of plant species to wide
ranging threats will assist in the future care of these and other species.
The Threatened Species Recovery Hub is also running a similar project to save threatened mammals - see Project 2.1 Emergency care – identifying and prioritising actions to save fauna species at acute risk of extinction.
Image credit: Tallong Midge Orchid, a threatened ground orchid (by John Briggs, FlickrCC BY-NC 2.0)
Many landscapes in Australia are fire-prone, and increasingly so. Altered fire regimes can have a serious negative impact on threatened plant species and ecological communities. A Threatened Species Recovery Hub project is working to better understand the effects of different fire regimes on threatened flora in order to improve fire management strategies and conservation outcomes.
Almost a quarter of Australia’s possums and gliders are listed as threatened under Australian environmental law, and many more are showing signs of decline. Dr Rochelle Steven from The University of Queensland believes people in the community can do a lot to support conservation, especially in urban areas.
The detection and monitoring of threatened species have been a strong area of research in the National Environmental Science Program and also the two national environmental research programs which preceded it. Hub Director Professor Brendan Wintle takes a look at what we’ve been achieving and why it is so important to the conservation of Australia’s threatened species.
In 2009, the Christmas Island blue-tailed skink and Lister’s gecko were headed for imminent extinction. Parks Australia acted quickly to collect remaining wild individuals in order to establish captive breeding programs on Christmas Island and at Taronga Zoo, Sydney, which have been highly successful. A Threatened Species Recovery Hub project team is working closely with Parks Australia to help secure a future for the two lizards beyond captivity.
The silver-headed antechinus and black-tailed dusky antechinus are carnivorous marsupials found in high-elevation forests in parts of central-eastern and south-eastern Queensland. They were only described in the past six years, but they are already listed as Endangered. Knowing where they occur is essential for effective conservation, but current distribution knowledge is patchy. To address this, PhD candidate Stephane Batista in partnership with the Queensland Herbarium and Queensland Department of Environment and Science is modelling the habitat where these threatened species are likely to occur, and is using detection dogs to rapidly survey these sites.