by Carla Caruso

Biodiversity is being monitored in your Park Lands.

The term refers to all the different kinds of life you’ll find in one area - each working together in ecosystems to maintain, balance, and support life.

The Park Lands Authority is a subsidiary of the Adelaide City Council. Christopher Butcher, the Council’s Senior Sustainability Advisor (Biodiversity) – Park Lands & Sustainability, led a presentation at last week’s Authority Board meeting, offering some interesting data and insights, as below. 

Four vegetation ‘communities’ – or traces thereof – make up your Park Lands and help provide a picture of how each area was and how they can be. They are: 

·      Grey Box/SA Blue Gum Woodland

·      SA Blue Gum/River Red Gum Woodland

·      River Red Gum Woodland, and 

·      Mallee Box Woodland. 

In partnership with the University of Adelaide, the City Council has begun testing drone-based monitoring of the native vegetation.

The program is still young. They’ll have a better idea of such coverage, based on this data, in a few years.

Fauna data, meanwhile, is being supported by expert consultants and groups like Butterfly Conservation SA, plus ‘citizen science’ input from events such as Birdlife Australia’s Birds in Backyards.

Two new fauna species for SA were recorded in a 2018 survey of Your Park Lands by NGT Consulting. This included the tortoise beetle, and the gold-fronted river damsel, pictured below.

Nicely, the findings also highlight the potential for more new species to be discovered.

Some fauna species, however, caused conservation concern during monitoring. These were the Eastern Water Skink, which has been classified as ‘vulnerable’, and the chequered copper butterfly, considered ‘rare’ - both pictured below. 

Biodiversity is further at risk from the State Government’s current plans to permit greatly increased building, destroying parts of Your Open, Green, Public Park Lands.

The presentation to the Park Lands Authority Board meeting also addressed the City Council’s efforts to reduce European carp numbers in Torrens Lake. A total of 2,482 carp have been removed as part of “electronic fishing” projects since 2011. 

Electronic fishing works to stun and remove the much-maligned, introduced species while other species swim away unharmed. Annual harvests indicate that carp populations are shrinking faster than they’re being replenished. 

The City Council’s also investigating options to improve water quality and reduce the occurrence of blue-green algae outbreaks at the lake. 

As well, the presentation highlighted two biodiverse, carbon-offset planting sites - one next to Adelaide High School in Ellis Park / Tampawardli (Park 24), and the other within Reservoir Park / Kangatilla (Park 4).

Both sites have been designed to demonstrate carbon-offset plantings to the public, not to monitor the reduction of carbon in the city.