Context

Context

Australia’s 125 million forested hectares is only 3% of the global forest area. Across climatic extremes they are mainly Eucalypt and Acacia forests fire-climax regimes, and are subject to cropping, grazing, mining and urban imposts. The National Forest Inventory defines a forest as land dominated by trees that have a height of at least two metres and a crown cover of at least 20 per cent. Close to 20% of the inventory is designated as conservation reserves with the balance being privately managed or owned. The state of the overall inventory is updated every five years.

Public concern over extinctions and old growth forests, many of which have been managed through leasehold for controlled logging has led Victoria and Western Australia to terminate such logging agreements. Seeking to inform public understanding of the role of fire, indigenous practices and selective forest thinning, impartial experts have pointed out that restoring logged forests doesn’t mean locking them up as wilderness – it means actively managing them. A broader consideration that takes a whole-of-landscape viewpoint ultimately includes replanted forests, farm forestry and agroforestry together with once-logged native forests.

The minority of forests planted on farmlands is easily overlooked yet they provide the links between other forests as well as local amenity, biodiversity through nutrition for birds and insects, corridors for wildlife and a diversity of fungal and plant associations. They are part of the human-altered environment, continuing a tradition from pre-European management systems where fire created open grasslands. Current best practice blends science of past and natural changes for management specific to a particular forest. The principles applied at Falvey Forest are those of an increasing number of small forest reserves.