National land assessment
National high conservation value land assessment
One of the major challenges of any reserve acquisition and management organisation is ensuring the land targeted and acquired accords with your vision and, as is often the objective, is of high conservation value – worthy of investment in its protection. With Bush Heritage, this project involved assisting with the development of a regional, ecosystem-process-based approach for land assessment in collaboration with Australian National University. The framework – called Biodiversity Prediction using Ecological Processes (or ‘BioPrEP’) – comprised identifying key conservation goals, each with a set of candidate criteria and associated metrics, and then sourcing appropriate datasets to tag reserve options for field checking. Most recently the approach has been adapted for use by Trust for Nature in the production of its Statewide Conservation Plan for private land in Victoria. The approach was published in Ecological Management and Restoration in 2010.
Mackey, B., Gilmore, S., Pringle, H., Foreman, P., van Bommel, L., Berry, S. and Haseler, M. (2010). BioPrEP – a regional, process-based approach for assessment of land with high conservation value for Bush Heritage Australia. Ecological Management and Restoration 11: 51-60.