How Wildlife Corridors are Saving Koalas.

In Australia, there is an animal that from birth till death lives amongst the trees. And their home on this continent that was once a big natural forest has slowly been cut, burnt, and divided into smaller and smaller, more segmented parts. In the last hundred years, koalas have been hunted for their fur, cleared out of most of their habitat by agriculture, burned out of the rest, Forcing dangerous ground migration. And in three of the Australian regions it lives in, it is officially listed as endangered. Which raises a very specific question. If a core habitat has been cut apart, can it be put back together? Can you rebuild a landscape that an endangered animal can safely return to? Right now, across this continent, there are people that think you can. So Veritree sent me all the way from Vancouver to southern Australia to understand why these forests are fragmented, what we're doing to reconnect them, and why one species of koala down here might be the most important in the entire country. Four projects across three states and thousands of people who spend their working lives on this problem. This is the story of what Tom found. And by the end of it, you'll know exactly what it takes to give an endangered animal a way back. And how any of us, wherever we live, can make a meaningful difference. This is Veritree's Tales from the Trees. Like it? It's a series now. Pretty cool, eh? Episode 4, Koala Corridors. So here's the obvious question. Koalas spend most of their lives up in trees. So why is it open areas like this where they often end up dying? Well, to answer that question, we first need to understand the koala itself. Koalas are cute, sometimes terrifying. They can't fight, they can't run. Nature did not, in any meaningful sense, qualify them for survival. One of the most important things about koalas is their diet, which consists of only one thing, eucalyptus leaves, which is hilariously toxic to almost every other animal on this continent. And it is because of this lifestyle that a koala spends the majority of its life in the canopy. The elevation provides koalas safety from the dangers that face a slow, unintelligent marsupial and provides a passageway for koalas to continue feeding on their yummy, delicate... Eucalyptus leaves. But when the highway runs out and the canopy stops, a koala has no choice but to come down. A young one might travel three or more kilometers looking for a patch of trees to call its home. Every year, hundreds of them are killed making that trip. Hit by cars, attacked by dogs, chased by danger. But let me introduce you to something that changes all of that. Standing down here, it may look like forest for miles, but watch what happens when you see what's all around me. These trees, what you might mistake as a natural grown forest, is actually entirely man-made, planted by community members to mimic the natural forest that once grew here. They provide shade to animals on the ground, biodiversity and plant species for herbivores to eat, and most importantly for this story, a connecting highway from larger patches of forest to others for our koalas to move across this land. I'm here at one of our planting sites that was planted only three months ago. All the trees have guards on them because the wallabies like to come through and browse on the eucalyptus especially. After only a few years, these trees are tall enough for the koalas to move in, use them as homes, a source of food, and the connective paths that lead them from gap to gap. Right now, we're three hours south of Brisbane in a part of Australia called the Northern Rivers. And before we talk about if these corridors are working for the koalas the way that we expect them to I first need to introduce you to the people that started this project. Well, it started with a phone call. One day back in 2016, rang me and he said, Linda, I need your help saving koalas. And I went, of course you do. This is Linda Sparrow, a friend of Veritree and the project officer of Bangalow Koalas. Not that I knew anything about koalas, but he was worried about this 400 meter stretch of trees up the top of Rifle Range near here in Bangalow, that he thought might be illegally cleared. And in that moment, a group of neighbors, including Linda, banded together to save it. And what they discovered standing in that 400-meter strip that they had just saved, was that a 400-meter strip on its own was not enough to save the koalas. Because koalas need to move and a single strip of forest means that eventually they'll hit a dead end. So they started planting outward, first to the neighbor's paddock, then to the paddock after that, trying to build out their first wildlife corridor. A lot of the koala habitat in the northern rivers is all in fragmented sections and what we're trying to do is connect fragmented populations and koala habitat and creating these corridors which allow the koalas to move freely across the landscape. Done properly, a corridor is infrastructure for wildlife, the same way roads are infrastructure for humans. And there's peer-reviewed research to back up their efficacy. A global meta-analysis found corridors increase animal movement between habitat patches by around 50%, compared to patches that weren't connected. Which brings us to a very core question. How do you actually build a wildlife corridor correctly? It turns out, a lot more carefully than you would think. Bangalow koalas plant a handful of very specific eucalypt species here. Every one of those species matters. Because these trees have to feed the specific koalas that live and traverse here. And then there's the design of this thing. These forests need to be wide enough for a koala to shelter in during the day, connected to existing habitats at both ends, with enough surrounding forest that the animal has a reason to stay in this area. But the trees themselves are only at the start, because here is the part that nobody ever thinks about, which is maintenance. We don't just plant trees and walk away and there's no maintenance or there's no going back and checking on the land holders and stuff like that. We're always working with the land holders. A well-built wildlife corridor is not a project that ends. It will always be a decades-long commitment. Because you can come here, you're on the top of the hill, you can see your corridor and you you can see it's working and you think What we're doing is making a difference. And this project is just one project of many. In the 10 years since Linda received that phone call, Bangalow Koalas has planted more than 534,000 trees across seven shires on 123 properties, aiming for 850,000 by the end of the decade. But of course, I have to throw you a twist because Planting trees is only half the story here, and to understand why, we have to drive 1500 kilometers to the south to a riverbank near Victoria, where we learn the second reason why planting these corridors matters so much. This is Ian. Ian works for the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife, one of Australia's oldest conservation non-profits. And where he's standing today, this specific bend of the Tarwin River, is one of the most biologically rich pockets of land left on the continent. And in the trees above him, a koala that doesn't exist anywhere else on earth. But that brings us to the specific reason why planting trees across Australia is not enough. When a population of animals gets small enough, it starts to breed with itself. Cousins with cousins, aunts with uncles, oh no. Over enough generations, rare traits that were supposed to stay hidden start to resurface. Gene pools get smaller, immune systems start to narrow, fertility drops and health problems begin stacking up. If a wildlife corridor cannot connect one population of koalas to another, both populations have a higher chance of dying out, which is one of the specific problems that this corridor is trying to address. One of the benefits that having A variety of DNA profiles means that you have effectively, you know, we're not having a mono species. Koalas were different in the past and so they should remain different going forward. So this corridor is becoming much more than a connecting koala highway like we had discussed at the start. It is becoming genetic infrastructure. It feeds the koalas, provides shelter and transportation, but it also gives that koala population more exposure to more mates and therefore less inbreeding. But even if you know of that, even if you can explain gene flow or hyperlocal adaptation or the Strzelecki's survival story, the actual work of a corridor still has to happen at the ground level. Which brings us to a discussion in restoration that we don't always talk about. Where are the resources to do this work coming from? When the highway was put in about five years ago, this section was basically isolated from use. So what used to be a paddock being run on a farm could no longer be accessed. As you can see, it's about six hectares, open pasture. It was way beyond our scope. There's no way we could ever get enough. Landcare is a network of volunteer environmental groups spread across Australia, and the Noorna Tarwin group had this paddock on a wishlist they couldn't afford to touch, until this happened. Without the funding from Felix Mobile and from Veritree, then there's no way anything would have happened on this site. It's just too big for us as a small landcare group to do it. 14,000 trees are going to be planted in this site over the next couple of months. Without that funding, the impact that volunteer groups like Landcare can make are unfortunately limited. The conscious buying decisions from the Felix community and all of the work that went into it from the amazing Felix team and all of the talented individuals at Veritree ended up having a real tangible impact on this land, which is what I like to call a proper koala-boration. Hey guys, Tom here. Yeah, Justin was immediately fired after that joke. We have a pretty strict no pun policy here at Veritree. Anyway, enjoy the rest of the video. Now clicking on this title and watching this video, we've made it clear that this video is about koalas. But the more we dug into wildlife corridors, the more we spoke with the people actually building them, the more we started noticing something. Koalas were not the only ones living in them. So right now I'm standing in a koala corridor and standing here I started wondering who else uses these corridors? The answer is basically everything. We've got wombats, there's a wombat burrow just behind us, bush rats, there's eagles, we've got gang gang cockatoos, critically endangered species. At the moment with these landscapes missing forest it's harder for them to pass through but as we sort of add in these pieces it sort of fills in the gaps and lets them move around. This last corridor runs 40 kilometers along a disused rail line and the last one stitched together 1700 hectares in South Australia. But when you get the type of trees, the sustainable funding source, the correct form of maintenance, all of these projects, no matter where they are, can have a long-term impact on the overall biodiversity of an area. And Linda, Ian, Landcare, Felix, and all of the other amazing people we have met on this journey down under are not only doing this great work today, they're hopefully, through the people they work with and inspire, creating an impact that lasts well beyond their years. So if any of this has landed with you, think about how the lessons of these projects can be applied to your communities and the wildlife areas that are near where you live. It's easy to hear stories like these and think that they're so far away from us that they're on a different side of the earth. If we can turn the outstanding impact done by these individuals on koala conservation into a story of global impact all around the world for many different types of wildlife. Then we could have made an exponential impact on the plants, animals, and the earth. Thank you. Hey guys, Tom here again. Just wanted to clear something up. We did not fire Justin for that terrible pun. We could never do that, but he has been severely reprimanded And it won't be happening again in the next video.