Phascogale Project

Working in collaboration with Wyndham Secondary College and Parks Victoria

The Friends of Brisbane Ranges is an active group which began in 1982. We provide opportunities for people to meet socially and learn about the environment, ecology, flora, fauna, and history of the Brisbane Ranges National Park and Steiglitz Historic Park in Victoria. We work on projects within the park. We are part of the state-wide network of National Park Friends Groups, initiated and organised by the Victorian National Parks Association, one of Victoria's leading non-government conservation organisations.

the Brisbane Ranges had a severe fire in 2006 that burnt about 40% of the park.  – in many places the understorey was gone and many hollow bearing trees were damaged..  After the fire we asked “what have we lost?”.  We looked at the fauna data on the Biodiversity Atlas but a lot of  data wasn’t there, with minimal sightigs recorded for some species.  So we had no idea what impact the fire might have had – there was no baseline data to work with.

Wildlife monitoring 

As part of the fire recovery we received funds for Elliott Traps and we started a trapping program. Parks Victoria lent us six camera traps to do some monitoring.  When we returned the cameras to Parks, we purchased our own. So we have been doing Elliott and camera trapping ever since.  We have a lot more fauna records going into the Biodiversity Atlas. We are looking to adopt iNaturalist for future biodiversity records, including locating hollow-bearing trees.

In 2016 we applied for funding under the DELWP Threatened Species Protection Initiative.  The grant was for 50 nest boxes in the Brisbane Ranges NP.  They can be used as a monitoring tool so we can find out where the population is going.  At present we don’t know how the population is changing over time.   We also put our hand up for a pilot crowd-funding program.  It was a lot of work but we were successful in getting funding and DELWP matched the funding $ for $.  So we had another bucket of money.  While most grants need to be completed in a short time, crowd-funding funds have no use by date.  So we can do some long term planning for work over several years.   

The crowd-funding gives us the freedom to explore new ideas rather than being tied to a strict budget and plan