Environmental Impacts on Native Wildlife in a Biodiversity Hotspot

Quick Info

Program Overview

The southwest region of Western Australia is known as a biodiversity hotspot, home to a large number of endemic species of flora, fauna, and wildlife. The biodiversity and management of such native wildlife presents special challenges for biologists, conservationists, and land managers due to Australia’s unusual climate, landforms, and rarity of many species. Climate change, population growth, economic development, and consumption of natural resources need to be carefully managed if a sustainable relationship between biodiversity and humans is to be achieved. During this seminar, we’ll analyze current issues in wildlife management and threats to biodiversity on both the global and local scale including changes to the physical environment due to climate change, loss of wildlife populations and species, the introduction of exotic species, and habitat modification and loss.

Program Activities

Meetings and discussions with protected-area managers and local academics, including conservation biologists, will facilitate exploration of some of the driving forces in our changing environment.

Site visits to reserves will allow participants to experience differing management strategies currently in place. For example, we will visit a local NGO sanctuary, Karakamia, which covers 275 ha of the Jarrah Forest. Their primary goal is to re-establish medium-sized mammals that have declined significantly in the region or have become regionally extinct through the restoration, protection, and effective management of a critical habitat and the exclusion of feral animals through a vermin-proof fence.

Program Objectives

During this seminar, participants will:

• Develop an understanding of how climate change on a global scale is impacting habitat loss at a local level.
• Gain insight into Australian environmental policy and management strategies for native fauna.
• Analyze how Australia is balancing the needs of its environment with increasing dependence on natural resources.
• Examine and discuss the impacts of climate change, introduced species, land clearing, and water scarcity on local wildlife.
• Examine population risks, including vulnerability and extinction, with particular attention paid to case studies from the southwest of Western Australia such as on the native species, the woylie.

Seminar Locations

Based in Fremantle with excursions to Perup Sanctuary in the southwest; participants fly in and out of Perth.