Managing impacts on biodiversity in the Brigalow Belt
Biodiversity faces a range of threats in our farming regions. And now there’s a new threat emerging in the form of an expanding Coal Seam Gas (CSG) industry (see the box on CSG). The threat posed by CSG operations isn’t simply one additional challenge to factor in because it interacts with all the other pressures being experienced by biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. Which threats should decision makers be paying particular attention to? Which management strategies should be applied? There’s considerable uncertainty around these questions which is why CSIRO is working with researchers from the University of Queensland to map the biodiversity management priorities in Queensland’s Brigalow Belt, an agricultural region rich in CSG resources.
In Australia, the Bowen and Surat basins in the Queensland’s Brigalow Belt bioregion (Figure 1) have been identified as large repositories of CSG. It’s believed almost two thirds of Australia’s CSG reserves lie here. The Brigalow Belt is also one of Australia’s most ecologically transformed areas. It has been subjected to broad scale clearing of native vegetation since the mid 1800s, largely to support the pastoral industry and agriculture.
The Brigalow Belt bioregion is of great importance in terms of its biodiversity. Within its area 147 threatened species and 100 ecological communities listed as threatened at the state level can be found. As much of the Brigalow Belt region is private land, it has been already heavily cleared and fragmented. Limited vegetation remnants are found on its more fertile soils. Therefore we require additional approaches for improving the long-term persistence of biodiversity through managing threats across tenure boundaries.
“Actions will be parameterised with costs, likely benefits and feasibility estimates, allowing their ecological cost-effectiveness to be ranked.”
Current conservation efforts in the region are limited and restoration has proved insufficient to maintain biodiversity values in the face of increasing threats like vegetation clearing. The emergence and expansion of CSG into many farming regions will compound existing threats and also bring new ones to the regional biodiversity. What should we be worried about and where should we prioritise our management?
What we need is a prioritised set of threat management strategies to assist decision makers in allocating scarce resources to conserving biodiversity. To assist with this decision analysis, some useful datasets exist. Unfortunately a complete set of empirical data for making informed decisions for the Brigalow is still unavailable. This creates challenges for decision-making in the region.
Figure 1: Map of the Bowen and Surat basins overlapped by the
Brigalow Belt bioregion and the APLNG Tenements.
Identifying the status of biodiversity and its key threats in an area is the first step to developing a cost-effective management plan that could improve the persistence of species. The next step is for scientists to investigate the major threats and potential management actions needed, in order to prioritise those actions based on their cost-effectiveness in mitigating threats. Prioritisation can be done using a species or an ecosystem approach or a combination of both, depending on the conservation objective, threats and available resources.
At CSIRO, in collaboration with the University of Queensland, we are currently working on a project that will analyse threat management priorities for improving the persistence of biodiversity in the Brigalow Belt region of Queensland. In this project we will bring together the best available scientific information and expert knowledge on the Brigalow Belt in order to identify the most important threats to biodiversity in the region and the actions to abate them.
Actions will be parameterised with costs, likely benefits and feasibility estimates, allowing their ecological cost-effectiveness to be ranked. Cost-effectiveness analyses enable comparisons of a range of management actions that will improve the persistence of biodiversity. With this project we will provide, for the first time, a region-wide analysis of alternative actions for managing threats to the biodiversity of the Brigalow Belt. And this analysis will include threats posed by CSG development.
More info: Rocio.Poncereyes@csiro.au
This research is funded by the Gas Industry Social and Environmental Research Alliance (GISERA). GISERA is a collaborative vehicle established to undertake publicly-reported research addressing the socio-economic and environmental impacts of Australia’s natural gas industries. For more details about GISERA visit www.gisera.org.au
Priority threat management
Similar exercises combining expert elicitation and cost-effectiveness analysis have been undertaken to map priority threat management in three of Australia’s most significant regions in terms of biodiversity: the Kimberley, the Lake Eyre Basin and the Pilbara. Follow the links below to find out how valuable this process can be.
The Kimberley see Decision Point #47
The Lake Eyre Basin see Decision Point #75
The Pilbara see the editorial in The Conversation
CSG
CSG is a form of natural gas extracted from coal seams at depths of 300-1000 metres. It is mostly made up of methane (95-97%) but contains a mixture of other gases as well. While the impacts of CSG extraction on terrestrial biodiversity have not yet been formally identified, the infrastructure required to support the extraction and transport of CSG is extensive. It consists of wells, pumping stations, storage stations, roads, railway networks and ports.