project summary

This working paper describes a project undertaken as part of the comprehensive regional assessments of forests in New South Wales. The comprehensive regional assessments (CRAs) provide the scientific basis on which the State and Commonwealth Governments will sign regional forest agreements (RFAs) for major forest areas of New South Wales. These agreements will determine the future of these forests, providing a balance between conservation and ecologically sustainable use of forest resources.

Project objective/s

The primary objective of the project was to develop added functionality within the C-Plan decision support software being used to select reserves in the New South Wales CRA process. This new functionality was intended to automate derivation of measures (indices) to guide the achievement of spatial configuration objectives specified by nationally agreed criteria for the establishment of a comprehensive, adequate and representative system of forest reserves.

Methods

Two types of measures were developed and implemented within the C-Plan software :

• Measures of patch size and connectivity to facilitate improved consideration of criteria such as “reserves should be large enough to sustain the viability, quality and integrity of populations”, “protection of the largest and least fragmented areas of old-growth”, “large reserved areas are preferable to small reserved areas” and “reserves should be linked through a variety of mechanisms”.
  
  
• Measures of geographical and environmental spread to facilitate improved consideration of criteria such as “reserved areas should be replicated across the geographic range of the forest ecosystem”, “the reserve system should ... sample the full range of biological variation within each forest ecosystem, by sampling the range of environmental variation typical of its geographic range” and “representation of old-growth forest across the geographic range of the forest ecosystem”.

Key results and products

The software produced by this project provides a greatly enhanced capability to address spatial configuration objectives when selecting new forest reserves.

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