The Biodiversity Council welcomes the opportunity to provide feedback on South Australia’s Land-based Protected and Conserved Area Strategy (the Strategy).

The Biodiversity Council supports the goals of the Strategy. To support goal 1 (a comprehensive, adequate and representative protected area system), the Strategy has assessed subregions that are not adequately protected. However, there is an opportunity to also address threatened species that are currently underrepresented in the reserve system. This would not rely on collecting new data or building new models of species distributions. A recent paper led by Dr Michelle Ward identifies urgent needs for protected area expansion to cover critically endangered species across Australia. The paper identified 305 Critically Endangered species that have narrow ranges (<20,000 km2), and are distributed in fewer than six discrete patches and determined how much was outside protected areas. The paper determined that approximately half of the combined habitat area for narrow-range Critically Endangered species was outside protected areas, with 39 species having their entire habitat outside protected areas.

There are key areas in South Australia that require protection to prevent these Critically Endangered Species from becoming extinct (see map below extracted from the paper). These should be the highest priority for protection under the Strategy.

The Biodiversity Council could help facilitate the provision of data layers underpinning Dr Ward’s analysis to the department.

This is just one example of the kind of detailed analysis that should inform new protected areas. Ideally the regional planning South Australia is doing will inform new protected areas, and even areas that could be restored and eventually added to the protected area estate.

Protected areas are critical to conserving biodiversity, but must be effectively managed. South Australia has a very large protected area system relative to its budget for management, so not all actions can be undertaken. To most effectively spend this limited budget, management actions need to be spatially prioritised based on the underlying biodiversity values, the benefits of particular management actions, and their cost.