Conservation of the Australian biota and rural and regional communities is at a critical crossroads and our generation is at the wheel. Three to five billion dollars in land degradation is accumulating every year, more species are going extinct here than on any other continent in the world and rural Australia is struggling with deepening cultural/economic crises about long-term viability. The perspective from deep time suggests that our current limited range of strategies for solving these crises, including reliance on the effectiveness of protected areas, will ultimately fail—sometimes catastrophically. Environmental and economic necessity urges us to consider all potential strategies that could turn this around, whether or not they fly in the face of conservative or minority group prejudices. Sustainable use of native wildlife, in urban as well as rural Australia, has the potential to increase the capacity for long-term effective conservation of the biota and rural and regional Australia, as it now does in other areas of the world such as southern Africa and as it once did in Australia when Indigenous people managed this continent. It may well offend animal rights advocates and environmental conservatives to suggest that valued wildlife could be the only alternative to no wildlife, but if that is the choice then there is no choice. The time has come to stand up to irrational views if they put at risk the long-term future of the natural and cultural things we value. Long-term conservation of the biota and rural and regional Australia requires that we trial new and potentially more effective ways of putting people and environments back together for the mutual benefit of both. This document overviews imperatives for change, potential if challenging initiatives that could assist traditional efforts and suggestions about how they might be translated into action.

We radiotracked 18 pet cats Felis catus from rural and urban areas within the City of Armadale, Western Australia, both at night and during the day between August 2003 and February 2005 to estimate the size of buffer zone required to reduce incursions by pet cats into native bushland. Home ranges of rural cats ranged from 0.07ha to 2.86ha, while those of urban cats were 0.01ha to 0.64ha. Male and female cats had similar home ranges and there was no evidence of seasonal differences in home ranges. The longest linear distance moved by any cat was 300m, so allowing a 20% margin for estimation error a buffer zone of 360m is needed to reduce incursions by pet cats into native bushland in this municipality.

The Rural Lands Protection Act 1998 , unlike its legislative predecessor, requires the Crown to control pest animals declared under the Act. It establishes conditions that must be met before animals can be classified as pests and before pest animal control obligations can be introduced on public land in New South Wales. The Act prevents threatened species being classified as pest animals. An application to list dingoes as a threatened species under the Threatened Species Conservation Act 1995 creates the potential for conflict between these two Acts. In this paper we describe the interaction between these Acts and the practical consequences arising from them. We also describe a proposed approach to wild dog control orders that binds the Crown under the Rural Lands Protection Act 1998 , and hopefully enables dingoes to be conserved in New South Wales.

There is little doubt that the dingo is the most reviled of all Australian mammals. Former dingo trapper Sid Wright emphasised the enmity of people towards the dingo, but argued that this “wild, magnificent creature” should be conserved in our national parks and reserves. It is the only native mammal not protected in NSW by the State's fauna legislation yet, in a bizarre twist, it is currently under consideration by an independent scientific committee for listing as a vulnerable species in NSW. This Symposium on the Dingo was convened to explore the kill-or-conserve dilemma. Stock protection remains a primary matter of rural concern today, and this is a concern for all wild dogs and not just dingoes, although no distinction can be made between them in control programs because it is not possible to separate them in the bush. Thus there is no method of selectively controlling wild dogs. As journalist Peter Austin explained to the readers of The Land : “The problem is not made any easier for the National Parks and Wildlife Service by the fact that it is required on one hand to protect dingoes on its lands as a native species, while meeting its obligation under the recently amended Rural Lands Protection Act to control wild dogs (dingoes included) that pose a threat to domestic stock”. Recent research by geneticist Alan Wilton gave rise to his unambiguous position: “The dingo in the wild is endangered due to hybridization with domestic dogs”. This confirms earlier work by Laurie Corbett and Alan Newsome. The NSW NPWS recognises that “wild dogs, including dingoes, cause substantial livestock losses and there is an expectation by rural communities that damage by these animals be minimised … However, as the dingo is a native animal, there is a public expectation that dingoes should be conserved”. The Service, as the leading wildlife conservation agency in NSW, accepts this responsibility as spelt out in its policy on Wild Dogs. One conservation option being negotiated is the establishment of dingo management areas, as presented in an interdepartmental joint submission to the NSW Parliament in a “Report on the Regulatory Controls Relating to Dingoes”. However, the management of dingoes at the interface of public lands and grazing properties will remain a contentious issue because of the need to balance the conflicting objectives of protecting dingoes while meeting the obligations of public land managers under the Rural Lands Protection Act 1998. Under the changes, the Crown is bound to control pest animals declared through Pest Animal Control Orders “to the extent necessary to minimise the risk of the pest causing damage on any land”. Management dilemmas can paralyse the decision-making process for land and wildlife managers, so this paper aims to advance the debate by examining matters of great concern to the wildlife manager and to the land manager: respectively, they are scientific evidence for genetic hybridisation of the dingo, and innovative management options. This paper suggests areas of compromise and reiterates Alan Newsome's conclusion that “there are no simple answers, and sometimes no easy compromises between the two imperatives, to eradicate and to conserve”.

Dingo conservation and wild dog control have historically been seen as antagonistic. Pest animal management provisions in the new Rural Lands Protection Act 1998 will bind the crown and make it imperative that policies for agricultural protection and conservation address these historic differences. This paper examines legislation relating to the control of dingoes and wild dogs in New South Wales, and outlines an approach to future management.

The Australian White Ibis Threskiornis molucca is an unexpected addition to the small number of native birds that have recently moved into urban and suburban areas. The arrival of the species in the Central Business District of Brisbane in South East Queensland has been accompanied by an increase in associated human-wildlife conflicts. In order to provide essential ecological information of the species in this region, a series of studies have been undertaken. The present study attempts to determine the distribution of the Australian White Ibis with respect to six major habitat categories positioned along an ‘urban gradient’ from the urban centre, through suburban, exurban/rural and industrial areas, to wildland and coastal areas. Foraging ibis were surveyed during vehicle-based transects covering all parts of a 545 km 2 study area. All ibis detected were assigned to one of 218 1.25 km 2 cells, which covered the entire study area. Ibis were detected throughout the area, though they occurred in highest numbers within urban and coastal areas. Ibis were found in 100% of urban cells, 20-55% of suburban, rural/exurban and industrial cells and were absent from all wildland cells. A large number and diversity of foraging substrates were used by White Ibis, with suburban areas providing the largest number.

In 1996, Government directives began a transition to conform logging in Western Australia's State forests to principles of ecologically sustainable forest management (ESFM). To place this in a historical context, we reviewed the history of the logging of jarrah Eucalyptus marginata forests to determine whether the volume of timber extracted and the main forest management practices employed were consistent with components of ESFM. While quantitative assessment proved difficult, usually the timber cut considerably exceeded the estimated annual increment of timber trees on forested lands. Overcutting often distressed professionals, who strove to regulate logging despite social, political and economic pressures. Furthermore, despite recent major reductions in permissible timber cut, areas of productive State forest have declined after conversion to alternative purposes. Thus it is important to prevent overcutting continuing in the remaining production forests. Too few data exist on the health or condition of forest ecosystems before logging to document subtle impacts. However, overcutting has interacted with broad-scale threatening processes in their impacts on forest fauna. These changes are all associated with reluctance to invoke effective adaptive management in association with the precautionary principle. The historical survey suggests that ESFM cannot be achieved without a socio-political will to assert long-term sustainable practice in the face of short-term goals. This could be achieved in the current preparation of a new forest management plan for Western Australia.

We review recent studies of the impacts of disturbance on the fauna of the jarrah forest, south-western Australia. In particular, we examine five case studies that provide alternative approaches to researching disturbance impacts. Assessing site-based studies of patterns of fire regimes lead us to argue that point measures of frequency are inadequate to understand scale and pattern across landscapes. Rather, extrapolating from site-based data to draw conclusions on landscape-scale changes may obscure fine-scale heterogeneity in disturbance, which is critical to the conservation of biodiversity. We review species-based studies and conclude that assessments of demographic trends are more effective than surveys in determining impacts, and providing early warning of declines because they highlight threatening processes. Furthermore, risk analysis, when critical aspects of the biology of participating species are weakly known, may lead to misclassification of species and poor decisions on conservation priorities. The review of recent impact studies of logging on jarrah forest fauna demonstrates that logging interacts with predation by foxes to threaten arboreal mammals. Hence, measures to protect threatened vertebrates benefit many species. However, while concentrating on proximate causes of fauna decline produces immediate conservation gains, long-term conservation requires an understanding of both proximate and ultimate causes and their interaction. We urge the acquisition of reliable, site-based demographic data that allows predictive modelling for species, and hence testing of alternative hypotheses regarding impact, distribution and decline. We also seek the integration of data and approaches to enable landscape-scale patterns to be discerned and interpreted for effective conservation planning.