Easier access to threatened species records for Queensland

One of the essential components of any environmental assessment is to provide information regarding the presence or likely presence of threatened flora and fauna on or near the study area.  It is an expected item within any report presented to local, State or Commonwealth assessment bodies, and there are two main reasons for this:

• some species of flora and fauna have been assessed by a leading scientific body as being more vulnerable to decimation or extinction due to declines in population or available habitat – meaning further impact to the species’ (or habitat) could have dire consequences; and
• threatened species are listed under State or Commonwealth legislation (or both) as critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable or near threatened and the law says that we cannot knowingly have a ‘significant impact’ on these species.

In many cases the assessment of threatened species is a key part of an ecological report, leading to changes in the way a development is managed throughout the planning, construction and operational phases.  For example, the confirmed presence of a threatened species will:

• affect the development footprint and design of the development,
• likely have flow on effects for permitting (i.e. for clearing of habitat or removal of specimens under the Nature Conservation (Wildlife Management) Regulation 2006),
• affect construction (e.g. requirement for staged clearing, pre-clearing surveys),
• affect operational management (e.g. monitoring of management protocols or any additional infrastructure, such as fauna passes), and
• likely lead to a requirement for provision of offsets under the Environmental Offsets Act 2014.

The way ecologists assess the potential for threatened species to occur within a study area is generally two-fold: a desk top assessment and field assessment.  The desktop assessment involves looking at past records of threatened species found in the area and comparing these records to the habitat available in and adjacent to the study area.  From this information some sort of a ‘likelihood’ assessment is made, usually resulting in species being considered as ‘unlikely’, ‘possible’ or ‘likely’ to occur in the study area.  Once the assessment is made, field work is undertaken targeting those species indicated as ‘likely’ or ‘possible’ in the study area and aiming to confirm the presence of the species.  Confirming absence of the species is usually difficult, particularly for more mobile fauna, and generally involves greater survey effort and seasonal replication.  It is usually a license requirement to provide the results of field work (i.e. locations and details of threatened species recorded) to Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage (DEHP), so that the knowledge base we have on our threatened species can continue to expand – although the requirement for detailed flora survey ONLY in ‘high risk’ areas (where previous records of threatened flora species already exist) will prevent the expansion of our distributional data on threatened flora (https://gaiaenviro.com.au/2013/06/protected-plants/ ).

Acquiring access to wildlife (flora and fauna) data is sometimes seemingly and unnecessarily complicated.  Whilst the Queensland Government holds all the data, it seems to be scattered around in different locations – Queensland Herbarium, Queensland Museum, Department of Science, Information Technology and Innovation (DSITI) (through Wildlife Online).  Some data, that is not necessarily the same as the Queensland data (but can be), is also held by the Australian Virtual Herbarium (AVH) or Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), which is associated with the Commonwealth Government body CSIRO.  The data held on ALA is a collaboration between CSIRO, Australia’s museums and herbaria, universities.  There are avenues to access all this data – some of these searches are relatively inexpensive and quick (generally those online), but others involve costs and can erode timelines.  A number of them are layered – for example, the protected plants trigger mapping (PALM) provides an area where threatened plants are known to occur, but no records.  It is then necessary to conduct a Wildlife Online search and possibly a Queensland Herbarium search (in instances where Wildlife Online returns no records) to find out what the field ecologists should be looking for.  Even then the Wildlife Online search results do not provide locational data (i.e. co-ordinates), just a list of species within a specified buffer area (usually 1-5km).  The Queensland Essential Habitat maps are the same (unless you have memorised all the taxon ID numbers for Queensland and the map happens to display some of them).  As a practitioner in Queensland, I have queried this separation of data in the past and was led to believe that it was important to keep the location of threatened species from the public to protect our most valuable flora and fauna from being vouchered by collectors.  Generally speaking, ecologists carry out threatened species searches to satisfy requirements of the legislation (Qld Nature Conservation Act 1992 and Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999) – so it would seem sensible that if you are satisfying the State’s NC Act, the most relevant database would be Wildlife Online (which is used to make the protected plants trigger maps and essential habitat maps).  However, because the information in the databases is not always shared this would not be an accurate reflection of the conditions of the study area.

The recent release of Biomaps by the Queensland Government is an exciting step in the right direction. Biomaps (https://apps.information.qld.gov.au/Storymaps/Biomaps/) is an online mapping application with a collection of Queensland Government’s biodiversity related information, such as regional ecosystems, wetlands, vegetation management, priority wildlife and biodiversity assessments. Biomaps can be used to generate biodiversity related reports; search, display and query spatial information; access and export wildlife records from WildNet – including species, common name, location (co-ordinates and description), date and conservation status.  The layers also allow the user to query the habitat type the species was recorded in.  Biomaps also contains records of species that are not threatened (which may be important when assessing species of local significance for local government). It provides a single place for all our wildlife data to be presented and maintained, however, in it’s ‘as released’ version it only contains Wildlife Online records.  To date this information on wildlife is not available on Queensland Globe, which is another GIS tool released by Queensland Government.  Another important difference to Queensland Globe is that Biomaps does not rely on the user to have access to Google Earth Pro – although it still requires a fairly capable computer to handle the processing of aerial imagery.

Gaia Environmental is looking forward to seeing where the Queensland Government will take their new mapping tool – Biomaps, and hopes to see the much needed conglomeration of wildlife data between various intra-governmental departments and potentially with the ALA.