The arid rangelands take in a swag of country roughly within the 250-350 mm rainfall line around Qld, NSW, SA, WA and the NT. Apart from the low, erratic rainfall that typifies this region and plays havoc with pastoral pursuits, the arid rangelands are known internationally as the home of age-old Aboriginal cultures, huge expanses of uninhabited country, quirky outback characters, and equally unusual desert animals like the bilby and marsupial mole.

These are just two of those desert animals that have undergone massive declines since European settlement of the rangelands, mainly due to changes in fire regimes, feral predator (cats and foxes) numbers, and impacts of introduced herbivores (rabbits, cattle, horses, camels, pigs, donkeys etc.). Mythical-sounding animals like the pig-footed bandicoot, crescent nailtail wallaby, short-tailed hopping mouse, desert rat-kangaroo, central hare-wallaby, desert bandicoot and lesser bilby are now extinct, and another ten species have disappeared from the arid rangelands and survive only on off-shore islands in WA or the NT or in southwest WA. Central Australia holds the dubious world record for mammal extinctions in recent times.

But the story is not completely gloomy and full of doom. Across the arid rangelands there are many land managers and community groups working to help protect the habitat of some of the remaining plants and animals currently threatened with extinction. These people are doing a range of activities from survey and monitoring work to on-ground fire management and feral predator control activities.

South-west of Alice Springs in the Palmer River catchment the Australian Plants Society has been involved in looking after two populations of the vulnerable Latz’s wattle (Acacia latzii) for over 10 years. Recognising that there were only two known locations of this arid zone wattle and that recruitment in this species was a very rare occurrence, the group liaised with the pastoralist who managed land where Latz’s wattle was growing and negotiated to fence off two small areas in order to protect trees from rabbit damage or trampling of seedlings from misplaced cattle hooves.

For the last decade volunteers from the group have been monitoring the rainfall inside these enclosures and following growth and seeding events of the Latz’s wattles. Until 2002 there had been no recorded germination events of this species and it was feared that the existing population would not be able to replace itself over the longer term if no new recruitment occurred. However the big rains of 2000-2001 resulted in some germination and since then a handful of seedlings have survived over a year and the group is monitoring their survival.

The Centralian Land Management Association (CLMA) is the main Landcare group for pastoralists in the southern NT and northern SA. The CLMA assists landholders with a range of natural resource management issues and on-ground projects for erosion control, rabbit eradication and weed management. It has also managed two TSN grant projects – one to survey and monitor populations of a plant (Ptilotus aristatus var. exilis) that only occurs on two pastoral stations north-west of Alice Springs, and another to involve pastoralists in looking for and monitoring populations of the nationally vulnerable black-footed rock-wallaby (Petrogale lateralis lateralis) on pastoral lands within the Lake Eyre Basin.

The black-footed rock-wallaby has become extinct in parts of its former range in the Lake Eyre Basin, most notably in the Davenport Ranges on the western side of Lake Eyre. CLMA’s project ‘Rock-wallaby Watch’ set out to determine the current status of rock-wallaby populations on pastoral lands within the Basin. The project found healthy populations persisting at several sites, despite the presence of considerable numbers of foxes – the main threat for this species. Long term monitoring sites were set up at two locations to monitor trends in populations by counting the number of scats (droppings) within permanent quadrants.

Elsewhere across the arid rangelands TSN is funding project work being done by a number of Aboriginal groups on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Lands in SA, Ngaanyatjarra Lands and Martu Lands in WA, and in the Tanami Desert region of NT to undertake important survey, patch-burning and feral management work to benefit a range of threatened desert animals such as the bilby, great desert skink, mulgara, marsupial mole, brushtail possum, and malleefowl. The tracking skills and ecological knowledge Aboriginal people bring to these projects are critical to their success, and recovery teams have benefited greatly from Aboriginal people’s input into helping plan recovery for several threatened animals in the region.