Freshwater Protected Area Resourcbook

3. Reserves in terrestrial and marine environments

Reserves specifically dedicated to protecting representative freshwater environments are rare in Australia - and around the world. Most of the major Australian sites which do exist have been established partly by States moving to meet commitments made by Australia under the Ramsar Convention (discussed in more detail below). To understand why this is the case, and to predict future trends, it is important to obtain a brief historical overview of the establishment of reserves in terrestrial and marine environments.
The following sections outline the growth of the concept of representative reserves – on land and at sea – in the Australian context. This section borrows heavily from the work of Richard Thackway and Bob Pressey ( See reference list. Square brackets are used below to acknowledge quotes of complete paragraphs).

3.1 Terrestrial protected areas

3.1.1 Commonwealth and State responsibilities

Under the Australian Constitution, the primary responsibility for land management lies with the State and Territory governments. Most of Australia's terrestrial protected areas, therefore, have been identified and selected, and subsequently declared and managed, by the State and Territory nature conservation agencies, on behalf of their governments. Only three terrestrial protected areas on mainland Australia have been declared under Commonwealth legislation in response to national and international concerns regarding these areas' outstanding natural and cultural values. These protected areas are declared and managed by the Commonwealth in partnership with the traditional owners of these estates. [Thackway 1996:1].

3.1.2 Historical perspective

A century ago, Australia was at the forefront of efforts to protect special terrestrial places. The first national parks in the world were created in the USA (Yellowstone National Park in 1872) and in Australia (Royal National Park, 1879). For the next one hundred years, reservations were primarily driven by a desire to protect the beauty of special natural environments, the inspirational values of wilderness, recreational resources, landscapes of particular cultural significance, or other smaller sites of special scientific importance or perceived fragility. With this historical perspective It is perhaps not surprising that the purpose of the USA Wild and Scenic Rivers Act 1968 is to protect the recreational and landscape values of wild rivers, not their biodiversity⁵³.
Australia was no exception to this general rule, with the result that, by the end of the 1960’s, Australia had a variety of large parks in rugged, infertile areas, but comparatively few reserves covering arable grasslands, fertile woodlands, or forests with high timber value. Parks and reserves had grown essentially by ad hoc and opportunistic acquisitions, often driven by parochial political pressures. It is important to acknowledge that many major sites of exceptional natural value were protected in this way.
However, as Pressey and McNeil (1996) point out, “ad hoc decisions have serious practical disadvantages. One is that, in Australia and many other parts of the world, they have led to the secure protection of areas least threatened by processes that reserves are good at preventing (Pressey 1994, 1995). In north-eastern New South Wales, for example, reserves are concentrated in the steepest, least fertile environments, even though an overall reserved area of 7% of the region might at first sound impressive” (Figure 1).

steeper

more fertile

Figure 1: Reservation of land in north-eastern New South Wales in relation to slope and fertility
Note: The vertical axis indicates the percentage of land in each of the slope and fertility classes that is reserved;
S1 – steep slopes, S2 – moderate slopes, S3 – flat or gentle slopes; F1 – low fertility, F2 – moderate fertility,
F3 – high fertility (from Pressey 1995).
Before the 1960s most protected areas in Australian jurisdictions were identified and selected by knowledgeable individuals and recreation interest groups whose recommendations were supported by government boards or committees. Early reserve recommendations usually had a local focus. By the mid-1960s this began to change with the widespread use of small-scale aerial photography and environmental maps, and as reconnaissance-scale biological survey data became generally available. Small-scale maps of surficial geology, climatic maps and vegetation maps provided ecologically meaningful surrogates as a basis for surveying biological communities (Myers & Thackway 1988). The use of these information sets provided the opportunity to develop more systematic approaches for identifying and selecting protected areas which sample the wide range of ecosystem types [Thackway 1996:2] although better surveys and better data have done little to offset the tendency to reserve areas of low value for commercial uses (see Pressey and Thackway Biological Conservation (96)55-82).

3.1.3 Growth of concerns over gaps in the reserve system

In the late sixties and early seventies, increasing concern amongst nature conservation professionals (see for example Marshall 1966) led to examinations of the degree to which terrestrial ecosystems (often using major plant communities as ecosystem surrogates) were protected. A review of the representativeness of Australia's reserves was undertaken by the Australian Academy of Science in 1968; this showed that, while each State and Territory had established systems of protected areas, they were not representative of the terrestrial ecosystems of Australia.
The first national systematic approach to identifying gaps in the representation of terrestrial ecosystems within protected areas was initiated by the Australian Academy of Science as part of the Australian contribution to the International Biological Programme (Specht et al. 1974). As a result, Specht (1975) recommended that at least one large sample of each major terrestrial ecosystem in each biogeographic division of each State should be incorporated into an ecological reserve, either by designating the whole or part of existing national parks and other nature conservation reserves as ecological reserves or, where necessary, by acquisition of land. [Thackway 1996:2]
The need to establish ecological reference areas in undisturbed samples of major terrestrial ecosystems resulted in the passage of Victoria’s Reference Areas Act in 1978. The Commonwealth initiated the Register of the National Estate in the late 1970’s⁵⁴, encompassing both natural and cultural places.
At the international level, Australia made a commitment to the development of systems of representative ecological reserves in 1982, when Australian representatives at the United Nations supported the World Charter for Nature, a resolution of the General Assembly of the UN in October of that year. The reservation of representative examples of all ecosystems – terrestrial, marine and freshwater – was an important tenet of the Charter. The text of the Charter is available on many websites, including www.onlyoneplanet.com.au.
During the 1980s there was a considerable expansion in the respective systems of terrestrial protected areas, both in terms of the number of reserves and the total area managed for nature conservation (Bridgewater & Shaughnessy 1994; Thackway 1996). While this rapid expansion would appear to be effective for the conservation of biodiversity, most of the growth of these systems tended to include areas for their spectacular scenery, value for recreation, or special features, for example, areas comprising the 'taller, greener, and wetter' end of the ecosystem spectrum (Thackway & Cresswell 1995a). During this period, four jurisdictions - Queensland (Sattler 1986), Tasmania (Tasmanian Working Group for Forest Conservation 1990), Victoria (Land Conservation Council 1988) and Western Australia (McKenzie 1994) - developed systematic ecosystem-based approaches which had as their goal the representation of typical examples of the environments/ecosystems in conservation reserves. [Thackway 1996:2]

3.1.4 Representative reserves: a national perspective

By the 1990s there was widespread recognition that the existing State and Territory systems of protected areas had developed largely in isolation from each other, with a variety of operational goals, using various scales of data and information, and using a variety of approaches for identifying and selecting protected areas.
The vision to develop a national system of reserves which sampled the wide range of major terrestrial ecosystems was supported by all nature conservation agencies, many conservation-based non-government organisations and the wider community. It was also demonstrated in a number of major intergovernmental statements and policies, including the 1991 draft National Strategy for the Conservation of Endangered Species (ANZECC 1991), the 1992 InterGovernmental Agreement on the Environment (Commonwealth of Australia 1992a), the 1992 National Forest Policy Statement (Commonwealth of Australia 1992b), the 1992 National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development (Commonwealth of Australia 1992c), and the 1996 National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia's Biological Diversity (Commonwealth of Australia 1996). In addition, in 1992 a House of Representatives Standing Committee on Environment, Recreation and the Arts inquiry into the role of protected areas in the maintenance of biodiversity identified the need for a systematic approach for planning the National Reserve System for Australia (HoRSCERA 1993). In its final report, HoRSCERA recommended the development of a nationally consistent bioregional planning framework for planning the National Reserve System. [Thackway 1996:3]
As an aside, it is important to note that the momentum which led to the development of a nationally consistent approach to the protection of terrestrial ecosystems appears to have been almost entirely lost in respect to the protection of freshwater ecosystems – at least at this point in time. The current (2003-4) LWA consultancy which aims to establish a national consensus on a framework for protecting high-value rivers and estuaries may re-capture this momentum.
The Australian Government was one of the first to ratify the international Convention on Biological Diversity⁵⁵ when it was opened for signature in June 1992.
Although the convention did not introduce the phrase “comprehensive, adequate and representative” (CAR) in relation to protected areas, this phrase has now been incorporated into all major Australian biodiversity programs⁵⁶.
In response to these national and international commitments, in 1992 the Commonwealth Government established the National Reserves System Cooperative Program (NRSCP – now known as the NRSP). The goal of that program was to establish the National Reserve System by the year 2000, in cooperation with State and Territory nature conservation agencies (Keating 1992).

3.1.5 The IBRA regionalisation framework

The NRSP is underpinned by the national Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia⁵⁷ (IBRA) - a framework developed in cooperation with the States and Territories (under the auspices of ANZECC) - to determine priority regions and ecosystems for reservation. Within the IBRA framework, the NRSP encourages States and Territories to address CAR principles in establishing a national system of protected areas. Within these limits, the NRSP is concerned with all types of ecosystems⁵⁸ - including freshwater ecosystems.
The principle underlying the selection of IBRA regions is the recognition that ecosystems depend largely on geology, landform, vegetation and climate, mediated by community succession, fire, soil development, and of course the impact of human activities⁵⁹. IBRA regions, then, are derived substantially from geomorphology, as are sub-regions which most often use land system mapping as the basis for their derivation. However, a comparison of IBRA regions and subregions with AWRC catchment boundaries reveals very little coincidence of regional and drainage boundaries (Janet Stein, pers.comm 2/8/03).
The reservation of sites solely on the basis of geology or geomorphic values has not yet been recognised as part of IBRA, and such sites are only picked up indirectly. Several States, however, have developed geo-conservation programs to cover this gap. One approach that could be considered further in freshwater systems is that developed by Brierley et al. on “River Styles”. This is a regional-scale method for defining river types based on geomorphic characteristics This approach has been applied in NSW and potentially provides both a geomorphic template for assigning conservation value, as well as providing an assessment of inherent geomorphic value and condition.
Freshwater ecosystems are not adequately addressed in broad-scale vegetation analyses. This is a result of the importance of fine-scale geomorphic variations in determining the structure and function of freshwater ecosystems - and the fact that the primary focus of ecosystem and vegetation mapping in most States has been on terrestrial floristic variation as the basis for differentiating between ecosystems and communities. Some States, such as Victoria, include a geomorphic component in the delineation of vegetation and ecosystem type, but finer scale analyses are required in developing a regionalisation framework suited particularly to freshwater ecosystems (see the discussion in the chapter on inventories below).
In summary, the IBRA framework was developed to assist the NRSP, and State governments, in identifying gaps in the developing system of CAR terrestrial reserves. Although obvious, it is critical to note that the terrestrial reserve program does not exclude freshwater ecosystems. IBRA regions contain repeating patterns of similar ecosystems. IBRA has established a framework to address biodiversity values within the context of broad-scale continental landscape patterns. By necessity, it involves broad-scale amalgamations of information on geomorphology, geology, vegetation, climate and soil type. In its current form it represents useful categorisations of habitat at the landscape and regional level. However, Bob Pressey's view is that few IBRA regions have consistent internal mapping at the 1:250,000 scale or finer, and such mapping is the starting point for useful conservation planning. Prioritising and reporting at the regional or subregional levels are too coarse to be useful in site selection (Pressey, pers.comm. June 2001).
Geomorphology, on which IBRA regions are partially based, includes information on drainage formations. However, the IBRA framework provides no more than a rough but useful base for categorising freshwater ecosystems, as it does not include information on hydrology or aquatic biology, and the scale at which it has been developed is at least an order of magnitude above the scale necessary for categorising rivers, and most lakes, wetlands and aquifers. Bob Pressey has suggested that it might be pre-emptive to begin a freshwater classification regionalisation with IBRA. It might be better to work on the detailed freshwater ecosystem data without it, and see what emerges (Pressey, pers.comm. June 2001). Work undertaken in NZ on mapping environmental differences in freshwater ecosystems is in an early stage of development, but could provide direction for an Australian program (see discussion of NZ programs below). Doeg (2001) and Metzeling et al.(2001) in re-working a selection of representative rivers in Victoria, relied only loosely on IBRA regions.
In the terrestrial environment, the field of reserve selection, dealing with the most effective locations for reserves in the landscape, is achieving some maturity and rigour (see Pressey et al. 1993; Scott et al. 1993; Pressey et al. 1996b for recent reviews). An important finding from the terrestrial work is that ways of using information to make decisions on the location of new reserves are highly transportable. They can be applied to any consistent database at national, regional or local scales in virtually any part of the world's land surface. [ Pressey and McNeil 1996:1]

3.1.6 Regional Forest Agreements

The task of identifying and selecting representative forest ecosystems was developed under a separate arrangement between the Commonwealth, State and Northern Territory governments (see Commonwealth of Australia 1992b; Commonwealth of Australia 1995). This program is known as the Regional Forest Agreements (RFA) Program, and was initiated in the Commonwealth Forest Policy Statement in 1992. A central element of the RFA program is an objective to establish a CAR⁶⁰ reserve system which, to the greatest practical extent, protects a target of 15% of each major forest ecosystem⁶¹ (using major vegetation communities as an ecosystem surrogate) existing at the time of European colonisation of Australia⁶².

3.1.7 Funding the National Reserves System

The policies of the Commonwealth Government, in Saving our natural heritage - Policies for a Coalition Government 1996, established a $1 billion Natural Heritage Trust of Australia (NHT), a funding program devoted to protecting and rehabilitating Australia's natural environment (Coalition Party 1996). As part of that program, $80 million additional funding (over four years) was made available to support the National Reserve System (see discussion above).
The funding boost for the National Reserve System (NRS) Program under the Natural Heritage Trust has helped achieve commitments made under the National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia's Biological Diversity to establish a comprehensive, adequate and representative system of protected areas – at least in regard to terrestrial ecosystems. There is a separate program to establish marine protected areas (discussed below).
The objectives of the National Reserve System Program are⁶³ – through working with all levels of government, industry and the community - to:

• 
  establish and manage new ecologically significant protected areas for addition to Australia's terrestrial National Reserve System;
  
• 
  provide incentives for Indigenous people to participate in the National Reserve System through voluntary declaration of protected areas on their lands and support for greater involvement of indigenous people in the management of existing statutory protected areas;
  
• 
  provide incentives for landholders (both private landholders and leaseholders) to strategically enhance the National Reserve System (Whitten et al. 2002); and
  
• 
  develop and implement best practice standards for the management of Australia's National Reserve System.