In Victoria, natural landscapes with sufficient scale and quality to largely maintain their ecological integrity, have, for the most part, only been retained in areas remote from historical development. These large and less disturbed areas are predominantly in public ownership as our national parks and State forests. The sustainability of these areas is fundamentally due to their size and their intact and functional natural processes, which means they are relatively robust in response to most perturbations or fluctuations of environmental or human origin. Historical development patterns and public land-use decisions have meant that these areas are now Victoria’s major reservoirs of biodiversity, in contrast to the rural and urban landscapes where the depletion and fragmentation of natural areas has resulted in a concentration of the elements of biodiversity that are now considered threatened.

The key management approaches in the largely natural landscapes are:

• to maintain largely natural ecological processes in a ‘comprehensive, adequate and representative reserve system’ through Park Management Plans, the Regional Forest Agreement processes, Forest Management Plans, and Fire Management Plans;
• to protect the integrity of these areas by controlling broadscale threatening processes;
• to maximise the conservation of biodiversity assets outside this reserve system, in the context of other uses that are ecologically sustainable.

The key objective in these landscapes is to continue implementing and improving the processes that are already in place to manage the environments in our State forests, parks and reserves. It is also important that we continue to improve our understanding of the natural operation of ecological processes in these landscapes so we can maintain their long-term health, productivity and catchment protection values.

An important function of management in the largely natural landscapes is to provide the ‘backbone’ of a ‘comprehensive, adequate and representative’ (CAR)system of terrestrial areas as part of a national reserve system. Comprehensiveness requires that the full range of natural communities and species is conserved;
adequacy requires the maintenance of ecological viability and integrity of populations, species and communities; and representativeness should ensure that the full biotic diversity, including genetic diversity, is included. These requirements are articulated in the Scientific Guidelines for establishing the National Reserve System (1997), which include the nationally agreed biodiversity criteria for the CAR system developed for the National Forest Policy (JANIS 1996).

Summary of the biodiversity criteria for a CAR reserve system in the forest estate

• As a general criterion, 15 per cent of the pre-1750 distribution of each forest ecosystem should be protected in the CAR reserve system with flexibility considerations applied according to regional circumstances, and recognising that as far as possible and practicable, the proportion of Dedicated Reserves should be maximised.
• Where forest ecosystems are recognised as vulnerable, then at least 60 per cent of their remaining extent should be reserved. A vulnerable ecosystem is one which is:
  • approaching a reduction in areal extent of 70 per cent within a bioregional context and which remains subject to threatening processes; or
  • not depleted but subject to continuing and significant threatening processes which may reduce its extent.
• All remaining occurrences of rare and endangered forest ecosystems should be reserved or protected by other means as far as is practicable.
• Reserved areas should be replicated across the geographic range of the forest ecosystem to decrease the likelihood that chance events such as wildfire or disease will cause the forest ecosystem to decline.
• The reserve system should seek to maximise the area of high quality habitat for all known elements of biodiversity wherever practicable, but with particular reference to:
  • the special needs of rare, vulnerable or endangered species;
  • special groups of organisms, for example species with complex habitat requirements, or migratory or mobile species;
  • areas of high species diversity, natural refugia for flora and fauna, and centres of endemism; and
  • those species whose distributions and habitat requirements are not well correlated with any particular forest ecosystem.
• Reserves should be large enough to sustain the viability, quality and integrity of populations.
• To ensure representativeness, the reserve system should, as far as possible, sample the full range of biological variation within each forest ecosystem, by sampling the range of environmental variation typical of its geographic range and sampling its range of successional stages.

  Forest ecosystems are often distributed across a variety of physical environments and their species composition can vary along environmental gradients between the micro-environments within the ecosystem.

  This approach will maximise the likelihood that the samples included in the reserve system will protect the full range of genetic variability and successional stages associated with each species, and particularly those species with restricted or disjunct populations.

• In fragmented landscapes, remnants that contribute to sampling the full range of biodiversity are vital parts of a forest reserve system. These areas should be identified and protected as part of the development of integrated regional conservation strategies.

Across the forest estate, in areas not included in the CAR Reserve System, the principles of Ecologically Sustainable Forest Management (ESFM) ensure that these areas contribute to biodiversity. The ESFM principles include protecting and maintaining biodiversity, ecological integrity where the health and vitality of the ecosystem are maintained, and invoking the precautionary principle. Forest Management Plans are the principal tools for defining the on-ground conservation actions in these areas and they will be developed for all forest areas. Many bioregions are linked by catchment flows, and effective forest management assists in ensuring that the quality of water leaving the largely natural landscapes and entering other areas is maintained. In general, the freshwater and wetland environments in these landscapes, particularly where the headwaters are relatively intact, are in good condition. Codes of Practice (e.g. for timber harvesting, road making) and other guidelines (e.g. for minimising soil disturbance in alpine areas) are applied to management activities to keep these environments in their present or better condition.

Given that these areas support substantial components of our biodiversity, special attention needs to be given to the strategic management of some of the more invasive threats such as environmental weeds and introduced predators.

Conserving biodiversity also requires complementary management of areas outside conservation reserves, State forest and the predominantly natural landscape. This involves a variety of mechanisms (see next chapter) under the theme of maximising biodiversity across the entire landscape.

Key Directions

• Continue to maintain the ecological integrity and natural processes of intact natural landscapes, by minimising disruptive impacts on these areas and restricting those impacts to localised areas.
• Develop and maintain a comprehensive, adequate and representative forest and parks reserve system.
• Complete Forest Management Plans and negotiate Regional Forest Agreements with the Commonwealth, using the National Reserve Criteria (JANIS 1996) and the principles of Ecologically Sustainable Forest Management to guide these processes.
• Complete the development of criteria, indicators and processes which inform managers and the community on the condition of biodiversity assets and ecological health.
• Investigate and implement strategic ways of managing the impacts on biodiversity assets of environmental weeds and introduced predators
• Develop agreed management strategies for land with significant conservation values.
• Continue to promote the investigation of natural ecological processes in these landscapes and adjust management regimes in response (e.g. the role of fire and grazing in the long-term ecological health of the natural systems);
• Encourage industry and recreational users of the natural landscapes to adopt, where they are not currently doing so, Codes of Practice with the objective of conserving biodiversity values.