Eco online

Is time running out for Fraser Island’s Dingoes?

By Jaylene Musgrave
Australia’s world heritage listed Fraser Island is renowned for its beautiful dingoes but the country’s purest strain of dingo is now on the verge of extinction under the Queensland Government’s current management plan. Some of the Australia’s leading experts are speaking out on the sad plight facing the island’s dingoes.
The late Steve Irwin’s father, Bob, says the dingoes [...]

Climate change: and the threat to our biodiversity

The mainstream media excites their readers and listeners with many things. Fall under their spell and you would almost be forgiven for thinking that the biggest threat from climate change, if you still believe the scientific facts as opposed to columnists’ opinions, will be upon the size of your wallet.
Professor Roger Kitching reminds us [...]

Good and the bad

Reflecting on World Environment Day, what have we done for the environment in the past year? Our Wildlife Volunteers Association, can be proud of its achievements this year, once again providing a 24-hour hotline for injured and orphaned wildlife.
So often, callers are just so grateful that they reach an actual person instead of the ubiquitous [...]

Koalas squeezed out by population growth

By Simon Baltais
Southeast Queensland is one of Australia’s biological hotspots. It is an area where the sub-tropical and temperate regions known as the McPherson/MacLeay Overlap Zone are a region of diverse landscapes from mountain rainforest to open woodland and wallum wetlands to huge sand islands, mangroves forest, seagrass meadows and coral reefs.
It’s not surprising then [...]

Bush refugees

WILVOS’ hotline is always a good indication of how our wildlife is managing out there.
We didn’t need a crystal ball 10 years ago to predict what was going to happen in southeast Queensland, and we don’t need a crystal ball now to see what is ahead for our wildlife. It is depressing!
This isn’t unique to [...]

Christmas is a time to help our wildlife

In recent months there has been a great increase in orphaned and injured animals being reported on the WILVOS hotline.  It always makes me so aware of the value of this 24 hour a day, 365 days a year rescue number for distressed wildlife.
It is always a challenge to find enough people to man the [...]

Wildlife: a changing climate is not their only concern

I wish that we could blame the decline of our Australian native species on one major influence such as climate change, but unfortunately that is not the only problem facing our wildlife.
Human impact, in many forms, have been the direct culprit from the moment humans stepped onto this beautiful country.  As the population has increased [...]

Dam opposition well and truly afloat

For a community that Government sources claim is starting to accept a dam, Mary Valley residents and others were showing no sign of it when they took too the river to visibly signpost the three mark in their fight too stop the proposed Traveston Crossing Dam.
Three years to the day since Peter Beattie’s shock announcement [...]

Ecology on show at World Environment Day Festival

Do bugs bug you? Do weeds drive you mad? Do you have a weed you want identified? Maybe you would like to know some of the uses for our local plants?
For all the answers, a series of Practical Ecology workshops at the free World Environment Day Festival on June 28th may be just the thing [...]

Is eco tourism saving the whales?

By Valerie Lewis
President of the Sunshine Coast Environment Council

All over the globe, people gather in their hundreds on boats, or are taken swimming with the sole purpose of watching one of their favourite cetaceans, whales. This activity has expanded to such an extent that it is now considered to be a major eco-tourism endeavour [...]