Conservation

What is the Button Wrinklewort?

Button Wrinklewort in grassy woodland near Ararat, with native bee visitor (Lasioglossum species)
~ Ben Courtice ~ Leave a comment

I spent the Honours year of my science degree researching the ecology of an endangered plant called the Button Wrinklewort. The what??? you may well ask. It’s OK, not many people have heard of it.

It’s a button daisy, that is, one without the large ray-petals on the outside of the flower-disk, so it has a button-like flowerhead. It’s native to southeastern Australia, and was perhaps quite common about 200 years ago in grasslands and grassy woodlands. It is now restricted to a few small and isolated populations in western Victoria, is locally extinct in Gippsland, and still has a few larger remnant populations in and around Canberra. I studied it in the old Truganina cemetery, where it has been fortuitously preserved since the 1800s, in the western suburbs of Melbourne. Continue reading →

Graduate ratios in a sane world

~ Ben Courtice ~ Leave a comment

This blog has been in hiatus as I’ve been a bit busy. Earlier this year I graduated from my BSc (Botany major) with first class honours. Hooray for me! And hooray for neuroplasticity which means I could still learn and do well despite leaving school some 20 years or so before I started university, and come to think of it I didn’t do any science at all in year 11 and 12 anyway. I think being interested goes a long way to crossing any hurdles like that.

The graduation ceremony was a bit bizarre. Not just the strange medieval costume, but the graduation session I was in had about 80% commerce students and the rest life sciences (a mix of health, agriculture and ecology, mostly). I don’t know if that’s representative of the entire semester’s graduates, but I think the ratio would be reversed if we lived in a rational world. Continue reading →

Grasslands: every bit counts

Dumbarton St grassland
~ Ben Courtice ~ 2 Comments

I visited the Dumbarton St grassland in Reservoir the other day. It was brought to my attention via an online petition asking the government not to sell it off for housing (please go there and sign!). It’s a large vacant block in a residential street, backing onto a linear reserve for a pipeline/aqueduct.

It doesn’t look much from the street, although grasslands often have that problem. The front half is mown and the back half is dominated by rank exotic grasses of the kind that tend to infest wasteland everywhere.

But in the centre is a small Eucalyptus tree (I think it was a River Red Gum), and in a halo around it, a spread of native grassland plants with few weeds among them. The Eucalypt probably takes enough moisture from the soil that the fast-living exotic invaders don’t bother with that area. So here there’s some mat-rush (Lomandra species), Bindweed (Convolvulus angustissimus), Nodding Saltbush (Einadia nutans), native tussock-grass (Poa species) and quite a lot of the once-ubiquitous Kangaroo Grass (Themeda triandra). And even among the weedy grasses, closer inspection reveals patches of Themeda are scattered here and there, and Convolvulus twining around the grass stems. Continue reading →

Melbourne’s western grasslands: going, going…

~ Ben Courtice ~ 1 Comment

Suburban developments, assuming they are necessary, can occur in many places. Endangered species and ecological communities do not have that luxury. It’s time to protect all the remaining grasslands.

An edited and updated version of this essay has been published at Green Left Weekly

Although about 99% of Victoria’s volcanic plains grasslands have been destroyed by development, some outstanding remnants of this unique ecosystem persist, especially on the plains just west of Melbourne (see for eg Smith 2015). This ecological community was Federally listed in 2008 as critically endangered (DEWPC 2011). Yet at the same time, the the then Labor government of Victoria was initiating an expansion of Melbourne’s Urban Growth Boundary that would severely impact the exact same areas. (DPCD 2008).

The government nominated two areas totalling 15,000 hectares to the west of the new growth boundary, called the Western Grassland Reserves (WGR). (DPCD, 2010). Developers are to purchase offsets within these areas in exchange for grassland destroyed by new developments (DEPI, 2013). Sadly these bold sounding deals are falling into disarray, with little conservation to show for it as development goes ahead even at the expense of endangered species (Arup 2015).

Continue reading →