Grassroots conservation actions by private landholders on small parcels in the urban/rural divide of Australia and beyond

Background/Question/Methods

Urban areas are increasingly encroaching onto bushland in regional Australia. This growth of urban areas creates an abundance of small, peri-urban parcels adjacent to bushlands. These landholders could potentially play an increasingly important role in biodiversity conservation through small changes to landscaping or other conservation actions on their property. Loss of native habitat and preference of developers clear and then use non-native plantings for landscaping make the landholder's decisions over time vital to the survival of natives such as the squirrel glider. In order to discover potential for these landholders to participate in conservation actions, their willingness to implement conservation strategies needs to be assessed in order to investigate the viability of future action requests. (1) What conservation behaviours do peri-urban landholders on the urban/rural divide in regional areas of Australia already demonstrate? and (2) What conservation behaviours might they be willing to implement on their property if asked by council or conservation organizations?  To discover answers to these questions, we developed a survey instrument to be distributed to an area identified as a regional suburb with high development and adjacent to bushland. Follow-up interviews were used to clarify survey results and gain deeper insight into participant reflections.

Results/Conclusions

From February to May of 2013, 300 households in the area returned surveys from 1820 distributed, for a response rate of about 16.5% and ten interviews were conducted with willing survey participants.  After analysis, results indicate that many peri-urban landholders in this region already participate in a variety of environmentally friendly behaviours (recycling, veggie gardening, composting) as well as biodiversity conservation behaviours (planting native plants) and generally demonstrate friendly attitudes towards the environment and in particular native Australian plants and animals.  However, what is less clear is how willing participants might be to implement conservation actions on their property, with many considering those sorts of issues to be the responsibility of the local councils and not an issue they can personally impact.  Participants demonstrated a disconnect between personal action and a knowledge these actions have a broader local impact.