Cooloola section of Great Sandy National Park bushfire recovery project
Fire impacts:
- 14,608 hectares of land burnt.
Flora and fauna prioritised for recovery efforts:
- 4 threatened flora species
- 8 threatened vertebrate fauna species
- native invertebrates restricted to the Cooloola section of Great Sandy National Park.
The Cooloola section of Great Sandy National Park has the largest remnant of coastal vegetation on the southern section of the Queensland coastline. It has a wide range of coastal vegetation types from the characteristic grass and she-oak covered sand dunes, freshwater lakes and coastal health through to diverse eucalypt woodlands, forests and tannin-stained paperbark swamps. It is home to threatened species such as the Eastern ground parrot that depend on the heath and sedgelands, and frogs and fish that are uniquely adapted to the acidic wetlands.
After the 2019–20 bushfires, an initial assessment of the most fire-impacted threatened fauna and flora identified two species of birds, four species of acid frogs, two species of freshwater fish, four 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 Cooloola section of Great Sandy National Park, South East Queensland .