Private native forests in Australia: What did we learn from the Regional Forest Agreement program

Abstract

Summary There are 1641 M ha of native forest across Australia, with 371 M ha in private ownership. A further 741 M ha are under private management in a variety of leasehold tenures. Across the Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) regions, about 25% of sawlogs (∼878 000 m32 y-1) were sourced from private forest prior to the RFAs. Privately managed forests are an important source of timber in many regions and provide other goods and services, including grazing, honey, water, biodiversity conservation and carbon storage. This report summarises the status and some aspects of management of private forests based on information from the National Forest Inventory and the Comprehensive Regional Assessments (CRA) that underpinned the RFA program. The private commercial native forests are in Queensland, New South Wales and Tasmania with smaller areas in Victoria and Western Australia. South Australia and the Northern Territory also have considerable areas of private forest, but only a small proportion could support commercial timber production. In most regions there is a relatively even distribution of the principal forest types on public and private land, but commonly some forest types in private ownership are either absent or poorly represented on public land. A number of RFAs include specific actions to conserve examples of these.nnn About 32% of the forests studied for RFAs are in private ownership, but generally forest use options considered only public native forests. However, because ecological vegetation classes were mapped for all tenures in all regions, significant information was generated on the distribution and conservation values of private forests. There were also timber assessments at the strategic level in some regions, and private timber production was documented for most regions. Management and disturbance history of private forests is overall not well documented. Disturbances such as fire and grazing, however, commonly cause impacts that differ from conditions in similar forest types on public land. Substantial areas of private forest have previously been cleared and are now in a regrowth condition. The primary outcomes of the RFAs for private land were improved knowledge of the forest estate and its management history: across all CRA/RFA regions, maps of forest types or forest ecosystem equivalents were produced, and statistics on areas and conservation values were derived. The identification of ecosystems occurring predominantly on private land and under-represented in the comprehensive, adequate and representative reserve system is an essential element in developing a conservation strategy across all land tenures.