Australian Ecologists Describe "Death Spiral" For All Large Land Species In Northern Territories

[hatrack]

ONE hot, dark night midway through March, John Woinarski, principal scientist at the Northern Territory's Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport, was out doing what he most loves: surveying the wild landscape of the Top End bush. But this task, in recent years, has become a burden. Woinarski, dropped by helicopter on to the high stone-country plateau of West Arnhem Land, already half-knew what he would find at one of his remotest monitoring sites, a stretch of 50sqm - rainforested, lush - beside a waterhole: nothing. Not one native mammal.

During recent decades, scientists have been recording a vast decline in the original mammal fauna of north Australia. In the past five years, for most species, that decline has become a death spiral. The picture is consistent across the north: in parks and in Aboriginal reserves, in pastoral country, in pristine rangelands, in coastal swamps. The pattern has been too plain to miss and many of the likelier causes have been identified, but the dizzying disappearance of animals from the landscape seems like something new. It is Australia's most profound ecological crisis; it is little known in the nation at large and still quite imperfectly understood.

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His group's 220 long-term monitoring sites cover the Top End's most untouched regions, places where one would expect the native wildlife to be surviving fairly well. Between 1996 and 2001, he and his colleagues observed the falling away and traced the ongoing pattern, but in the following five years it was as though the native fauna population had plunged from a cliff's edge. The newest findings were "the game-stopper". They recorded an average 70 per cent drop in species numbers and an 82 per cent drop in the total of animals seen at each site. These declines were in all environment types and all family groups. Even in national parks, where protection regimes are in place, the figures were devastating. "The most recent results are extremely alarming; indeed, catastrophic," Woinarski says.

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ust more than a year earlier, Woinarski and his core team had published a preliminary report card on the vanishing. Lost From Our Landscape, their 250-page overview, constitutes an unusual field guide, a book of what's not out in the environment any more. It is filled with the details of the NT's most threatened species, including 40-odd small mammals: bilbies, mice, wallabies, quolls, bettongs, rat-kangaroos in obscure and appealing variations. It weaves a familiar narrative. The last great wave of Australian extinctions was experienced in the Centre, between the 1930s and '60s, when most of the 20 mammal species known to have been lost from this continent disappeared. That pattern is now repeating further north: animals that were once common are critically endangered. One of the best-known cases is that of the golden-backed tree-rat, an exceptionally graceful creature, which was last seen by European eyes in the NT in 1969 - a stray sighting in Kakadu's Deaf Adder Gorge, though Woinarski may have found a hair sample from a lone animal a few years back, and Aboriginal residents of the Arnhem Land Stone Country plateau believe the species survives in one remote rainforest patch.

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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25380215-30417,00.html

[pleah]

1. K&R

[smoogatz]

2. Welcome to the freaking apocalypse.

Holy crap.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

3. We are very poor stewards.

This is devastatingly sad.

[glitch]

4. We were never stewards, just consumer monkeys with delusions of grandeur.

But agreed, it is devastatingly sad.

[HamdenRice]

6. Actually if you read the whole article, it's saying "we" were good stewards

One of the chief causes of the decline, according to the article, is the disappearance of people from the territories -- and by people, I mean aboriginal people.

The aborigines managed the seasonal fires, and some believe that a return of the aborigines is the key to saving the eco-system:

At the centre of this jigsaw puzzle lies fire, the chief force in the northern landscape. Tropical fires are very different from the dread bushfires of the south. Much of the savanna country burns every dry season. A flight over the Top End or North Kimberley in the months of July or August is a flight through thick plumes of smoke. Once, the burning season was tightly managed by Aboriginal land users, but the depopulation of the bush during the past century has served to change the vegetation cover and the fuel load. As a result, for decades, wildfires have raged in some parts of the Top End, causing deep shifts in the appearance and mammal populations.

How to manage fire, how to encourage and fund Aboriginal management of country from remote outstations? These are among the policy questions that face environmental scientists across the north. Again, the balance of factors is elusive. Too little burning can change habitats; too much can be just as damaging, incinerating breeding terrain and opening the country to new predators. A new regional scheme, the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement Project, run by the outstation-based Warddeken Land Management, aims at targeted burning, designed to reduce fuel loads and to increase the rate of carbon sequestration in trees. Long-term indigenous jobs, preservation of traditional knowledge and promotion of environmental stability are its ambitious aims.

William Cronon made a similar argument about Native Americans in the northeast. When English settlers arrived they were astounded by the number of animals to hunt. When the Native Americans were driven away, the animals disappeared. It was because the Native Americans were "managing" the forest, through fire and selective cutting in a way that maximized resources for animals.

Some hunter gatherer societies actually seem to "grow" their game, and when the hunters disappear, so does the game.

[depakid]

5. Sounds like the journo might have a bit of the bleak

Which so easy to fall into.

[Dead_Parrot]

7. Can't think why

It's not like we've fucked the entire planet or anything.