If wallum habitats in drought carry more and bigger fires there will be fewer opportunities for animal recovery when droughts end. Animal populations could soon be lost from the smaller remnants. Photo © Tim Low

Independant ecologist Tim Low has produced a large report for the Queensland Government, Climate Change and Queensland Biodiversity, to help guide biodiversity management in Queensland. Among his findings are:

The sharpest gradients of rainfall and temperature in Queensland occur from west to east, and this is likely to be the main direction in which species movement occurs, rather than from north to south. 

It is questionable whether many eucalypts will change their distributions in response to climate change. Fossil and genetic

The green ringtail possum (Pseudochirops archeri) could be faced with less nutritious leaves as well as higher temperatures.
Photo © Terry Reis

studies in Australia show that Australian plants and animals were less mobile in response to past climate change than northern hemisphere species, and this is likely to hold true in future.

Eucalypts lack methods of dispersing their seeds (apart from small wings on Corymbia species) and high investment in pollination appears to be their main strategy for surviving climate change - they have mobile pollen instead of mobile seeds. Protection of long range pollinators (flying foxes, lorikeets and migratory honeyeaters) should thus be an important element of adaptation.

Heatwaves that cause mass mortality of wildlife could become a serious problem in south-west Queensland, where many species live close to their high temperature limits in summer. Tens of thousands of birds died in inland Australia during an extreme heatwave in 1932, and heatwave deaths were recorded in the Simpson Desert in 2009.

Tree planting for carbon sequestration should consider the risks of dense trees reducing water flows to streams.

The report assesses the vulnerability of each Queensland bioregion, and contains many recommendations. It is available on the DERM website.

And here is an article from The Courier Mail.

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