National Parks first ever conservation forum
Conservation Matters
In October, the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) held their first-ever conservation forum, a two-day meeting held in the Ballroom at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba. The event featured talks and posters on conservation issues across the organisation, along with field trips to areas of conservation significance in and around the Katoomba area. It was a great opportunity to share knowledge and experiences as conservation needs continue to grow across Australia. Dinner was in the Carrington’s stunning, recently renovated Grand Dining Room.
The theme of the forum was Conservation on Country, and the first speaker was Gundungurra elder Aunty Sharyn Halls, who gave a keynote talk on the conservation work she is involved with in the Blue Mountains. It was followed by several talks on partnerships between Indigenous groups and NPWS.
Many presentations highlighted threatened species and environmental monitoring work. Trent Forge, from the NPWS Saving our Species program, gave an update on Brush-tailed Rock-wallabies, including the Jenolan rock-wallaby colony, and their post-fire recovery. Other topics included include wildlife and vegetation monitoring by drones, specially developed monitoring apps, ecological restoration through mapping of pre-European animal communities, environmental DNA and camera trapping. Feral animal control, climate change challenges, and translocations of animals (for instance, native rodents) to areas where they once occurred were all on the agenda.
Jenolan was represented at the forum by Dr Anne Musser, our Conservation Campaigns Officer, who presented a poster with several collaborators on current conservation initiatives at Jenolan. These include ongoing monitoring and assessment of Jenolan’s platypus population, biodiversity monitoring and recording, discovery and naming of new cave invertebrate species and palaeontological work on bones in the caves. Anne joined a field trip to Blackheath to see habitat restoration work after the 2019-2020 bushfires and the peat-swamp habitat of the endangered Giant Dragonfly (Petalura gigantea).
