They provide a valuable genetic resource and seed bank, contain rare and endangered species, provide shelter for livestock, wind protection for crops and mitigate land degradation such as erosion and salinity.
Sounds incredible, right? Yet you see the remarkable lifeforms that do these tasks every day in the form of roadside remnants.
Roadside remnants are important examples of woodland threatened ecological communities in the Wheatbelt NRM region.
And we want your help to understand how much and what quality of remnant woodlands remain on our roadsides.
In some areas of the Wheatbelt roadside remnants are among the only intact woodlands remaining.
Road maintenance is therefore a major threat to the remaining stands of Eucalypt Woodlands in the region through clearance and weed and pathogen spread.
Clearing permits are routinely granted for this purpose, to improve road safety and amenity. This enables the destruction of some of the few remaining intact stretches of TECs across the region.
This clearing also causes the loss of mature eucalypts, resulting in long-term impacts for species like the threatened black cockatoo.
A recently approved application for clearing along the York-Merredin Road, for example, will cause the loss of 38.85 hectares of native vegetation, some of which will be TEC Woodland.
This includes foraging habitat and 592 potential nesting trees for the Carnaby’s cockatoo and 38.2Ha of foraging and breeding habitat for the red-tailed phascogale.
While the impacts will be offset by purchasing and protecting 261Ha of remnant vegetation elsewhere, the clearing will represent a net loss.
To be eligible for TEC status a minimum patch width of 5m applies to all Eucalypt Woodlands. To assist us please fill out our TEC survey here.
This project is supported through funding from the Australian Government’s National Landcare Program.