Stirling Ranges flora translocation project reflects on six years of fighting for the area’s threatened plants

Ecologists are looking back on efforts to safeguard some of the Stirling Ranges’ most threatened plant species, celebrating six years of the Stirling Range flora translocation project.

The translocation project was established to help at-risk native species thrive again after parts of the Stirling Range National Park was decimated by a bushfire in 2018 and 2019.

The national park is home to about 1500 species of flowering plants, 90 of which are endemic to the Stirling Ranges, found nowhere else in the world.

The area endured three major bushfires in 2018 and 2019, and some of these native plants struggled to recover.

In 2020, the translocation project, a collaborative effort between the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions and South Coast Natural Resource Management, kicked off, with the aim of re-establishing some of the species impacted by the fires.

Two seed production areas were built in the Porongurups and Redmond State Forest, with 15 threatened plant species getting a kick-start in a safe, controlled location before they are replanted on the ranges.

DBCA flora conservation officer Megan Dilly said the seed orchards were an “insurance population” for the threatened species.

“If we have anything major happen in the natural populations and we lose all of our wild populations, we do have an area where we have them growing,” she said.

“We’re just in this amazingly diverse area that is so at risk.

“As hard as it is and however many obstacles we have, we do keep just plugging away and doing what we can.”

The job also involved fencing off young seedlings in their natural habitat to protect them from rabbits and other animals that might eat them, and replanting species in the ranges once they were big enough.

South Coast NRM’s Tom Nagle said the region was one of 20 priority places around the country where conservationists were aiming to have no new plant extinctions.

“I mean, these spaces are hanging on literally by a thread and it’s amazing to see the work that’s getting done here,” he said.

“But without projects like this and developing insurance populations through seed collection and ex-situ populations and keeping an eye on them post fire events, it’s unlikely that you know, my kids would ever know of their existence.

“Really passionate people and this seed orchard, it’s just incredible to see the insurance population because they’ve got it pretty tough in the wild.”