South West NRM Project Manager Derani Sullivan removing stakes and tree guards at the Treendale planting site.
Conservation work to benefit the critically endangered western ringtail possum has arrested its decline, but helping them thrive again means creating more safe habitat, particularly within our urban environments.
That was the aim of our project carried out between 2019 and 2022. We recruited more than 1,000 community volunteers, with support from project partners, to help us plant seedlings at specially-selected sites across the Bunbury and Busselton-Margaret River regions with a long-term plan to help re-connect tree canopies and improve habitat for western ringtail possums.
We also conducted extensive night-time surveys to monitor populations, behaviours and habitats.
The loss and fragmentation of habitat is one of the primary threatening processes for nearly all of Australia’s threatened species.
As our CEO Dr Manda Page explained in her ABC South West radio interview (37m:47s) with Stan Shaw on Friday, July 19, dense habitats where possums can jump across the treetops, reducing their need to come down onto the ground where they become vulnerable to threats like predators and cars, needed to be one of the key conservation efforts.
“We get to live in this amazing natural environment that’s around us and therefore we are responsible for making sure they don’t go extinct and making it as friendly for wildlife as we possibly can,” Dr Page said.
In the wake of record-breaking dry spells over the past year and confronting images of mature native trees up and dying en masse in response to the lack of soil moisture, we’ve nervously started re-visiting some of our previous tree planting sites to assess survival rates.
So far we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the growth of our little seedlings with attrition no higher than the generally expected average for revegetation projects of about 30 per cent.
And what’s even more heartening is news from annual citizen science possum tallies throughout the region over the past 8 years showing that our efforts – combined with those of government, researchers and local landcare and wildlife groups – appear to have actually arrested continued decline of this iconic species.
The possum habitat project formed part of a broader investment by the Australian Government’s National Landcare Program in restoring threatened species of the South West region and delivered by South West NRM between 2018 and 2023.
For more information about our related work, please visit the below sections of our website.
