Wildlife Conservation in Farm Landscapes

WILDLIFE CONSERVATION IN FARM LANDSCAPES

Dedication

For the many farmers with whom we have worked and are doing outstanding restoration and management on their farms

For the Australian taxpayer – our sincere hope is that the investments that have been made in our work over the years have been more than repaid by an increased understanding of how to better manage our nation’s precious natural heritage and, at the same time, do productive and sustainable farming.

WILDLIFE CONSERVATION IN FARM LANDSCAPES

DAVID LINDENMAYER, DAMIAN MICHAEL, MASON CRANE, SACHIKO OKADA, DANIEL FLORANCE, PHILIP BARTON AND KAREN IKIN

© David Lindenmayer, Damian Michael, Mason

Crane, Sachiko Okada, Daniel Florance, Philip Barton and Karen Ikin 2016

All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, duplicating or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Contact CSIRO Publishing for all permission requests.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Lindenmayer, David, author.

Integrating wildlife conservation in farm

landscapes / David Lindenmayer,

Damian Michael, Mason Crane, Sachiko Okada,

Daniel Florance, Philip Barton and Karen Ikin.

9781486303106 (paperback)

9781486303113 (epdf)

9781486303120 (epub)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Wildlife conservation – Australia.

Wildlife management – Australia.

Agriculture – Environmental aspects – Australia.

Farm management – Australia.

Land use, Rural – Australia – Management.

Michael, Damian, author.

Crane, Mason, author.

Okada, Sachiko, author.

Florance, Daniel, author.

Barton, Philip, author.

Ikin, Karen, author.

639.90994

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CSIRO Publishing

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This project has been assisted by the New South

Wales Government through its Environmental Trust.

Front cover (clockwise from top left): tree plantings in farm landscape (Chris MacGregor), Eastern Grey Kangaroos (Dave Blair), Red Wattlebird (Jennie Stock), farm landscape (Dave Blair), Blue-banded Bee (Clement Tang), Southern Rainbow Skink (Damian Michael).

Back cover: (left) Jacky Winters (Marlene Lyell), (right) Eastern Bearded Dragon (Chris MacGregor).

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

1Introduction

The underlying philosophy of our applied research work and the scientific process

The concept of ‘scale’

The structure of this book

Our use of common and scientific names

Caveats

2Birds

Bird breeding success in woodland patches

Birds in nest boxes

Birds and paddock trees

Networks of species – friends and foes

Not all patches of bush are equal – bird responses to different kinds of broad vegetation structure

Why are there such marked differences in bird occurrence between the different kinds of vegetation?

Which attributes of remnants are important for birds?

Which attributes of plantings are important for birds?

Birds and travelling stock reserves

Pines and woodland patches

Bird responses to total vegetation cover at different scales

Bird occurrence over time

Do plantings get better with age?

Birds and the Millennium Drought

Management interventions and birds

Are birds good indicators?

Concluding comments

3Mammals

Introduction

Habitat trees, paddock trees and arboreal marsupials – the case of the Squirrel Glider

Countryside elements and mammals – the special case of the Squirrel Glider

Mammals in nest boxes

What makes a good woodland remnant for arboreal marsupials?

Mammals and travelling stock reserves

Can there be too many mouths to feed?

Change in mammal abundance over time

Mammals in woodland patches surrounded by pine stands

Concluding comments

4Reptiles

A way of categorising reptiles

Reptiles and regrowth woodland

Do reptiles use tree plantings?

Boulenger’s Skink and lizard morphology

Rocky outcrops and reptiles

Management interventions and reptiles

Reptile assemblages

Reptiles in woodlands surrounded by stands of pine

Concluding comments

5Invertebrates

Kangaroos and beetles

Ants in grazing landscapes

Butterflies in grazing landscapes

‘Bugs’ and pines – what happens to invertebrates in eucalypt patches surrounded by pine plantations

Concluding comments

6Vegetation cover and plants

Introduction

Increase in vegetation cover over time

Changes in vegetation attributes over time

How management interventions changes and improves vegetation

Where in landscapes are key vegetation structures most likely to occur?

Paddock trees as keystone elements in agricultural landscapes – changes in paddock trees over time

Mistletoe as a key resource

Large logs as a critical resource

Home grown – native grass as a key habitat resource

Rocks are good for plants too

Regeneration dynamics in grazing landscapes

Where it is best to do plantings and how they should be designed?

Concluding comments

7Managing wildlife friendly farms

Introduction

Protect what is already there

Restore what is missing

Putting it all together – evidence-based farm planning for integrating farming, biodiversity and other values

Developing evidence-based farm plans

Concluding comments

8General discussion

Generating co-benefits – farming, carbon and wildlife

Being paid to conserve biodiversity on farms

The dangers of over-intensification

Fire and farm planning

Why monitoring is important

Concluding comments

Appendix 1 – List of common and scientific names

Appendix 2 – References

Index

Preface

Our research team at The Australian National University (ANU) has worked for almost 17 years in Australian agricultural landscapes, especially in the temperate woodlands of southern New South Wales (NSW), but also more recently in mixed grazing and cropping areas in north-eastern Victoria, central western and northern NSW, and south-east Queensland.

There is a large and rapidly growing body of research work from many people leading to many discoveries and important insights into wildlife management on farms. A lot of new findings have emerged in the past 5 years from numerous projects in Australia’s wheat/sheep belt. These findings have revealed that many things can be done to conserve wildlife while at the same time maintaining other key aspects of farm productivity and profitability.

Although much new research has been published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, we are acutely aware that very few people will ever know about these articles – let alone read them. It is important to communicate this information to a far broader audience than our scientific colleagues. Hence the writing of this short book. In a sense, we feel a sense of duty to communicate (in a hopefully readily understandable way) to the many farmers, catchment managers, revegetation practitioners and others with whom we have worked and we trust will find this book (and the science that underpins it) of practical use.

We have written several past books on wildlife on farms and Australia’s extraordinary temperate woodlands, with CSIRO Publishing as our trusted publishing partner in those volumes. Our aim was not to repeat earlier information, nor to clumsily regurgitate the content of many dozens of scientific articles. Rather our objective was to report new findings that build significantly on our past work. In so doing, we hope to empower all of those people in rural Australia in their efforts to meet the significant (but not insurmountable) challenges of integrating conservation with ecologically sustainable agricultural production.

The authors

June 2015

Acknowledgements

A large number of people and organisations have contributed to our research and management efforts in temperate woodlands and agricultural areas of southeastern Australia.

A particular mention must be made of the hundreds of landholders who have allowed repeated access to their properties and in many cases done a lot of restoration and conservation work on their own land.

Funding for our research has come from many sources including the Murray Local Land Services (especially supported through Emmo Willinck), Riverina Local Land Services (especially supported by Lilian Parker), North East and Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authorities, Australian Research Council (Linkage Grants, Centre of Excellence), the Australian Government’s National Environmental Research Program, the Environmental Stewardship Program (via the former Lachlan Catchment Management Authority and especially David Trengove), the Long-term Ecological Research Network (LTERN), and the former Land and Water Australia.

We thank the many scientific colleagues and friends with whom we have worked and published on farm and woodland conservation over the years including (among many others) Rebecca Montague-Drake, Richard Hobbs, Suzanne Prober, Andrew Bennett, Alan Welsh and Christine Donnelly.

No book writes itself and we thank Tabitha Boyer and Claire Shepherd for assistance with many aspects of book production. We also thank Clive Hilliker for his assistance with scientific illustrations.

We would also like to thank the many talented photographers who provided their work to make this book so visually engaging.

John Manger and Tracey Millen from CSIRO Publishing have been wonderful with their support in publishing syntheses of our work over many years. Their efforts are most gratefully acknowledged.

1

Introduction

An increasing number of Australians want to be assured that the food and fibre being produced on this continent has been grown and harvested in an ecologically sustainable way. This will increasingly be a major challenge for society as human populations continue to expand, rates of resource consumption increase, and some kinds of resources become increasingly difficult to grow, find or extract. The challenge is:

•How can we maintain or even increase food production without undermining the productive capability of farms and without significantly eroding biodiversity?

Ecologically sustainable farming means producing food (including meat) while at the same time maintaining the quality of soils, preserving (and even expanding) patches of native vegetation, and conserving the array of species that are integral to key ecological processes such as pollination, seed dispersal, natural pest control and the decomposition of wastes (e.g. the carcases of dead animals).

The challenge of developing ecologically sustainable farming management practices has been a major objective of research by The Australian National University (ANU) in agricultural south-eastern Australia since the late 1990s. Our work has grown over the past 17 years to encompass sites and farms from central Victoria, through NSW to south-eastern Queensland. In all, we now work on over 847 field sites that are located on over 300 farms (Table 1.1; Fig. 1.1). Indeed, our research – part of which entails many repeated visits to permanently established field sites – is arguably one of the largest scaled terrestrial monitoring programs in the world. Visiting so many sites, farmed in different ways and in different regions, has provided a large number of the insights that feature throughout this book. On this basis, we outline ways that different groups of animals and plants might be conserved on farms, while at the same time ensuring that those farms are viable businesses.

Table 1.1.Long-term biodiversity monitoring programs being conducted by the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the ANU in the temperate woodlands of south-eastern Australia and which form the basis of work summarised in this book.

The information reported in this book is based on surveys conducted across various ecological vegetation communities (EVCs) in each study area. Monitoring program

Fig. 1.1.Map of the location of field studies and site locations conducted by the ANU throughout the agricultural areas of eastern Australia.

The underlying philosophy of our applied research work and the scientific process

Our underlying research philosophy is to provide high-quality scientific information to landholders, regional land managers and other interested people to help them implement best practice farm conservation and farm management. That is, we gather the scientific evidence to guide making decisions such as where and when to do plantings or which remnants of native vegetation are the best ones to protect.

Positive conservation management is often billed as a negative for farm economics. Not so. On this farm near Wagga, the Chalkers have worked hard to improve the quality of the waterbodies by strategic fencing and controlled stock access points around dams and creeks. This has led to improved water quality for stock and assisted in maintaining water availability during prolonged dry periods. At the same time, waterbody management has significantly improved bird biodiversity on the farm, with a dramatic increase in bird species richness (particularly of bird species of conservation concern) over the past decade. Photo by Mason Crane.

There are several ways in which robust scientific evidence can be gathered. The approach used by our team at the ANU is relatively simple to write down, but painstaking and time-consuming to do. We outline this approach below as we believe that it is important for readers to appreciate how the science is conducted and how our conclusions are reached:

1A land manager or member of our scientific team identifies a significant problem or set of issues for which there is currently no definitive scientific answer.

2A field study is rigorously designed to address the problem. This is typically in a collaboration between scientists, professional statisticians and land managers (including farmers). This part of the work usually entails carefully defining the questions to be posed, the statistical design that can be used to implement a study to answer those questions, and the methods employed to collect the data in the field.

3A small pilot study may be conducted to determine if the experimental design proposed to implement a study is actually possible to do on the ground.

4The results of the pilot study are examined and the study (if viable) is then fully established.

5Following initial establishment, our field studies may run for several years and sometimes decades.

6At various intervals during long-term data collection, a sixth (and critical) stage is that information from the field is subjected to detailed statistical analysis. This is typically done through a partnership between an expert statistical scientist and one or more ecologists.

7The results of statistical analyses are written up and then assessed by colleagues within the Fenner School at the ANU. Scientific articles demand precise writing to emphasise what discoveries have been made. It is also essential to make it clear what scientific and statistical methods have been used so that other scientists could replicate the work if they so desired.

8When the scientific article is of sufficient quality and all the details of the analysis and writing are finalised following comments from colleagues, it is submitted to a national or international scientific journal to be considered for publication. Such articles typically undergo thorough critique from anonymous referees, with requests to revise the article to improve its quality. This eighth stage is a very tough one in which a scientific paper is often rejected by one or more journals. The article must then be further revised and improved before it is submitted to another journal. It may take submission to four or five journals before a scientific article is finally accepted – a process that may take 2–3 years if the target is a high-quality international journal. This long and arduous process of science publishing requires considerable patience, a thick skin (to deal with repeated criticism and rejection), and a massive dose of persistence. Many members of the public are unaware of just how tough (but also rigorous) the scientific publishing exercise can be.

9Widely communicate the scientific findings to a broad audience. When a scientific article is published, it is then available for other scientists, as well as any member of the public or management organizations, to read. However, few people even know that most of scientific journals even exist, let alone read the highly technical articles they contain. We therefore work hard to produce books (such as this one), posters, glossy brochures, calendars and DVDs. We also present our findings to natural resource managers in workshops, to landholders at field days, and give lectures to school groups. These activities are designed to ensure that our new scientific findings are communicated and accessible to a wide audience beyond scientists and academics.

Repeated and careful measurements of biodiversity made over many years provide the essential, high-quality empirical data needed to determine how species are changing, and why they are changing. Many members of the research team at the ANU have been working on the same sets of farms in Victoria, NSW and south-eastern Queensland for well over a decade. Photos by Damian Michael, Dan Florance, Mason Crane, Dave Blair and Thea O’Loughlin.

Of course, there are many different approaches to creating quality evidence-based science beyond those underpinned by the collection of field-based empirical data. These include genetic analyses of samples collected in the field, systematic reviews of the literature, and simulation modelling (such as predicting the viability of populations of animals or plants). We have employed all of these methods in our 17+ years of research in Australian agricultural landscapes. But our general approach is always the same. That is, rigorously gather scientific information, subject those data to the best possible statistical analyses, write up the results at the highest possible standard, and widely communicate key findings.

The concept of ‘scale’

Our many studies have been conducted at different spatial scales – from a single bird nest or large hollow tree through to entire regions or even multiple regions. As an example, we have worked on the success of individual nests of birds, the use of individual trees (such as paddock trees) by marsupial gliding possums, on the importance of particular patches (e.g. a planting or a woodland remnant) for birds, reptiles and mammals, and on the value of entire farms and landscapes for supporting populations of particular species and assemblages of animals. These different studies completed at different spatial scales provide different insights about animal responses to agricultural environments and what management actions might be most effective at particular scales. Indeed, exciting discoveries can be made when our datasets are simultaneously analysed at several scales.¹ These multi-scaled studies tell us that actions at one scale (such as the farm level) can have profound effects on biodiversity at other scales, such as the likelihood a given patch will be occupied by a particular species of bird (see Chapter 2). Such investigations also indicate that actions at a given scale, such as the decision to establish a planting or fence a woodland remnant, can (and does) make a positive difference to the environment at several scales.

Improving outcomes for biodiversity on farms requires a strong working partnership between landholders and researchers. Farmers implement particular kinds of management interventions on farms and researchers design rigorous scientific studies to determine the effectiveness of these interventions for improving outcomes for wildlife on farms. Scientists then communicate their results to farmers and suggest ways in which management might continue to be improved (e.g. by changing the width and shape of plantings). Updated management actions then continue to be subject to research and monitoring, underscoring the value of farmers and scientists working together to improve the integration of wildlife conservation and agricultural production. Photo by Mason Crane.

Another kind of scale is time. The scientific jargon sometimes used is ‘temporal scale’. Environments are never static and Australia, in particular, is famous for climatic variability: all landholders are critically aware of the major changes in the environment between very wet and extremely dry years. It is