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Under
the working banner ‘Operation Big Bird’ the
Foundation plans to create a 250km wildlife
corridor along Australia’s Wet Tropical
Rainforest coast in the State of Queensland.
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The Mission Beach district, located in Australia’s
wet tropical rainforest of far north Queensland,
is the most important area for cassowaries
in the Wet Tropics bioregion but is under extreme
pressure from an array of threats. While Australian
and Queensland State legislation has regulated
clearing of cassowary habitat, urbanisation
and residential development continues to threaten
the viability of cassowary populations as habitat
continues to be incrementally cleared or severely
modified.
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An example of fragmented cassowary
habitat |
In areas such as this
where habitat is severely fragmented, small
incremental losses over time may eventually
lead to a landscape matrix not able to support
a viable local cassowary population. The potential
advantages of an integrated cassowary corridor
network include:
1. Higher immigration rates
that will maintain species number, increase
population size, prevent inbreeding,
and encourage the retention of genetic
variation.
2. An overall increase in
foraging area.
3. Escape routes from threats
and cover for movement between habitat patches.
4. Access to a mix of habitats
providing a greater range of resources over
a greater period of time.
5. The landscape-scale nature
of the network will also benefit many
other species of wildlife and vegetation communities
by:
- Encouraging long-term
conservation agreements for native vegetation
on private property.
- Mitigating some of the
detrimental ecological impacts arising from
surrounding land-uses.
- Enhancing ecological
connectivity between existing areas
of protected native vegetation thereby providing
conduits through which:
- wildlife can disperse
from areas which have reached maximum
carrying capacity and/or competition,
and recolonise other favourable habitats,
potentially improving the conservation
status of the population;
- wildlife can follow
or escape local or longer-term seasonal
changes in environmental conditions;
- wildlife can access
previously separated populations
with which breeding may take place, better
maintaining and possibly improving genetic
variability.
- allowing other ecological
processes (eg. seed dispersal) to benefit
from an increase in wildlife
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