The forests pledge
ITS TIME TO END LOGGING IN NATIVE FORESTS ACROSS AUSTRALIA
Half of Australia’s forests have been lost. https://theforestpledge.com.au/
Outrage as endangered species living in forest goes unnoticed by loggers chopping it down. 'Nothing to see here': Greater gliders, yellow-bellied gliders, koalas and powerful owls.
“Forestry Corporation admitted that they don’t do surveys for the nocturnal greater gliders at night! No wonder they aren’t finding any — they don’t want to find them, as it would seriously restrict their operations,” CEO Jacqui Mumford
"Endangered marsupials have been discovered inside a forest that was being chopped down by the NSW government, prompting calls for its operations to be suspended across dozens of sites across the state."
"After the Environmental Protection Agency was asked to intervene this week, NSW Forestry Corporation voluntarily asked its contractors to cease operations at the Styx River State Forest which borders the Cathedral Rock National Park, west of Coffs Harbour. It’s the second time since August the state-owned agency has been forced to down chainsaws because of the discovery of greater gliders."
The impacts of extreme heat events on wildlife
How koalas are trying to cope
Temperatures are predicted to swelter above 40 degrees today in NSW. People are retreating into their coal-fired AC houses and AC combustion boxes. Dogs are offered drinking bowls at almost every door in Bellingen, but Australian animals are out there in a degraded landscape, having to deal with the extreme heat we generate.
Koalas are "using a tree species they don't feed on ... [hugging] the main trunks of trees and lower to the ground. We came up with the idea they were losing heat to the tree trunks. I found a colleague with a fancy thermal camera and went out in hot weather and it's exactly what they were doing. By pressing their body into the coolest tree they could find, the koalas halved their need to drink water in heatwaves. Hugging trees may not be enough for koalas to maintain their already dwindling distribution with rising average temperatures."
Logging practices:
"It's basically dead" AI reveals the legacy of decades of logging in Victoria
"An AI-based analysis of 20 years of VicForests’ logging, researchers say, shows the scale of failed regeneration in Victoria’s state forests.The data, which has been shared exclusively with the ABC, suggests that 20 per cent of Victoria’s state forests have not regenerated after logging.... That’s almost 13,000 hectares of state forest the analysis found to be standing in a state of ruin."
"Now the state is shutting its native logging industry in a matter of weeks, and the forests that were once given to Victoria’s state-run logging agency, VicForests, are being returned to the public."
"By law, the logging agency is required to regenerate the areas it has logged and hand them back to the public in a healthy state. But until now, how much that has actually happened has largely been a mystery."
Despite $246.9 million in taxpayer money, Forestry Corporation still lost $28 million
"The Nature Conservation Council of NSW has today released a new report from Frontier Economics which reveals for the first time that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been gifted to the taxpayer owned logging business Forestry Corporation NSW over the past five years."
"The NSW Government needs to come to terms with the fact that native forest logging is a dying industry and make a plan for a transition. How much more taxpayer money has to be wasted and endangered animals killed before this reality sinks in?" Statements attributable to NCC Chief Executive Officer Jacqui Mumford
>> https://www.miragenews.com/forestry-corp-loses-28m-despite-246-9m-taxpayer-1120847/
Re-establish koala populations on fragmented habitats
"Where you've had a population grow from a small number of individuals, there's always potential for inbreeding."
"Drones with thermal cameras have been used to count the koalas and sound recorders are being installed in national parks, and on Crown land and farms along a 100-kilometre stretch of the river. We put the data through a computer and it takes hours and hours and hours of recording and just chops out the little snippets where it thinks there's a koala — then those little snippets get manually verified."
Best practice would be to refrain from logging koala habitat in the first place.
"A Supreme Court justice has ordered VicForests to temporarily halt the harvesting of fallen trees at a site in Victoria's west, after a community group alleged it had not surveyed for threatened species."
"Wombat Forestcare began court proceedings last week seeking an injunction for the site in Wombat State Forest, alleging VicForests had not checked the area for species of owls, quolls and reptiles."