Biodiversity and Conservation

PIRSA Forestry supports the protection and enhancement of natural and cultural values with forest landscapes. We provide advice to assist forest industries; landholders; and the public to achieve best practice managment of these issues.

Current activities include:

  • Supporting collaborative research into best practice management for forest industries.
  • Preparing natural and cultural heritage information for forest industries.
  • Evaluating strategies aimed at increasing the connectivity of native forests.

Biodiversity and Plantations

In most situations, plantations occur as part of a mosaic of land use types across a landscape. Other types of land use can include native forest, watercourses, wetlands, pasture, cropping, vineyards as well as roads, buildings and towns. Plantations can provide habitat, shelter and food for a range of native species that may other land uses.

The conservation of biodiversity is being increasingly recognised as a key part of the management of existing plantations and the establishment of new ones. Best practice techniques include:

  • Retaining and protecting native forest remnants and wetlands within plantation landscapes to provide important habitat for a wide range of species such as birds, mammals and reptiles.
  • Retaining and protecting native vegetation along watercourses and ridgelines as these areas can be valuable dispersal routes for some species.
  • Actively managing pest animals and plants within plantations and nearby vegetation to reduce competition pressure and predation upon native species.
  • Establishing corridors between native vegetation remnants to provide shelter, food and protection from predators by imitating the structure and diversity of native vegetation.
  • Ensuring activities within plantations do not unduly affect native species including those in nearby native vegetation.  

Native Forest Reserves

More than 24,000 hectares of remnant native vegetation are protected as Native Forest Reserves and are managed by ForestrySA for native flora and fauna conservation. They are not cut for timber.  They protect valuable areas of tall eucalypt forest and woodland, as well as wetland environments. 

Learn more here - Native Forest Reserves

National and Conservation Parks

More than 4 million hectares of South Australia’s forests are contained within National or Conservation Parks (NPs and CPs) and managed by the Department for Environment and Natural Resources. These include large outback parks such as Flinders Ranges NP, Gawler Ranges NP and Ngarkat CP. Many parks in higher rainfall areas are also forested including those at Belair, Cleland and Deep Creek. These contain taller forests often dominated by Manna Gum (Eucalyptus viminalis), SA Blue Bum (E. leucoxylon) and Messmate Stringybark (E. obliqua).

Learn more here - National and Conservation Parks 

Other Native Forests

Significant areas of native forests also occur on other land tenures including:

  • Leasehold land (mainly pastoral areas) - 5.2 million hectares
  • Private land (including Heritage Agreements) - 800,000 hectares
  • Other Crown land (and unresolved tenure) - 850,000 hectares