Gondwana World Heritage Area bushfire recovery project
Fire impacts:
- 30,000 hectares of land burnt.
Flora and fauna prioritised for recovery efforts:
- 24 threatened flora species
- 14 threatened vertebrate fauna species
- native invertebrates restricted to the Gondwana World Heritage Area.
The Gondwana Rainforests of Australia, commonly known as the Gondwana World Heritage Area, represents outstanding examples of major stages of Earth’s history, ongoing geological and biological processes and exceptional biological diversity.
The Gondwana World Heritage Area (GWHA) features unique ecosystems including subtropical rainforest, warm temperate rainforest and cool temperate rainforest that are ancestral remnants from the Gondwanan supercontinent that existed 180 million years ago.
Queensland has 16% of the GWHA with 60,000 hectares of 50 different regional ecosystems mapped across protected areas including Lamington, Springbrook, Mount Barney and Main Range National Parks—half of which is rainforest.
Approximately 33.7 % of the GWHA in Queensland was burnt during the 2019–20 bushfires. This included almost 4,000 hectares of rainforest, which is of significant concern given that rainforests have not evolved to adapt to fire.
The Gondwana World Heritage Area provides habitat for more than 200 threatened plant and animal species. An initial assessment of the most fire-impacted threatened fauna and flora identified five mammal species, five bird species, three frog species, one reptile species, 24 species of plants and several groups of endemic invertebrates as being of greatest concern.
The project’s recovery actions comprised the following:
Read the full report Bushfire Recovery 2020-2021: Priority actions for threatened species in the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area, South East Queensland.