The value of National Parks - a timeless heritage

Dove Lake, Cradle Mountain - Lake St Clair National Park, Australia (c) SO

National Parks, those precious territories of conservation, can be found world-wide across Africa, Asia, South America and Europe but they originated in just two countries - the United States and Australia. The first national park to be proclaimed was Yellowstone in the US in 1872, the second being the Royal National Park in Australia in 1879. Since then the concept has been introduced across the world but with vastly differing results and often severely challenged by land use conflict for human activity.

Australia now has over 500 national parks with over 28 million hectares of land designated as national parkland accounting for almost four per cent of Australia's land areas. A further six per cent of Australia is protected under various land categories such as state forests, nature parks and conservation reserves.

As at 2015, Australia has 19 World Heritage areas, a number of which also encompass national parks. Tthe United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) lists areas and structures as World Heritage when they are deemed worthy of special protection due to representing the best examples of the world's cultural and natural heritage. It's something of a mixed blessing for a number of World Heritage sites have also been lost due to war and religious conflict demonstrating that protection was little more than a theoretical concept. 

The key World Heritage sites in Australia with a nature significance are listed below:

• Great Barrier Reef (inscribed 1981)
• Kakadu National Park (inscribed 1981)
• Willandra Lakes Region (inscribed 1981)
• Lord How Island Group (inscribed 1982)
• Tasmanian Wilderness (inscribed 1982)
• Gondwana Rainforests of Australia (inscribed 1986)
• Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park (inscribed 1987)
• Shark Bay (inscribed 1991)
• Fraser Island (inscribed 1992)
• Australian Folssil Mammal Sites (Riversleigh, Naracoote) (inscribed 1994)
• Heard and McDonald Island (inscribed 1997)
• Macquarie Island (inscribed 1997)
• Greater Blue Mountains Area (inscribed 2000)
• Purnululu National Park (inscribed 2003)
• Ningaloo Coast (inscribed 2011)

The key challenge is matching conservation with public access for it's becoming more apparent that its possible for national parks to become too popular leading to large volumes of people traversing the fragile ecosystems and habitats with resultant degradation of the natural environment.

Freycinet National Park, Australia (c) Sentinel Owl

Wildlife corridors - more hope than ecological reality

One of the fundamental challenges confronting ecologists and wildlife conservators is finding an acceptable balance between preservation of natural habitat versus the intrusion of human activity usually related to economic and development objectives. The answer, it has seemed, lies with the creation of wildlife corridors which enables isolated ecosystems to be linked by 'corridors' of under-developed or undeveloped tracts of land/forest/bush. The theory is based on the idea that wild animals will move through the corridors and interbreed with other threatened populations of the same species and thus make threatened groups more resilient. How much evidence exists however that this process actually works ? In reality the evidence is thin and limited. For example. in the Brazilian Amazon, the corridors are only required by law to be 60 metres in width yet studies of birds and animals in the region found that a width of 400 metres was required. As a result, there has been no success with the corridors as they currently exist.

The seven coutnries of Central America and Mexico have all agreed to join together the many small protected areas in their borders to form the MesoAmerican Biological Corridor. Unless there is considerable more knowledge and data on optimum corridor size and biological diversity, it's unlikely this initiative will succeed.