Article
Stretching almost 200 kilometres and over 400,000 hectares along the western “horn” of the Greater Border Ranges, the Bunyas to Border (B2B) corridor links two of Southeast Queensland’s most significant natural landmarks: the Bunya Mountains in the north and the World Heritage-listed Main Range National Park in the south. Following this stretch of the Great Dividing Range, the corridor takes in more than a dozen national parks and conservation reserves and at least 95 distinct vegetation communities — a mosaic of rainforest, wet and dry eucalypt forest, woodland and striking volcanic landforms, rising to around 1,000 metres at either end.
It’s a landscape that has always mattered for wildlife movement, and it matters more than ever now. As the climate shifts, B2B is emerging as a critical pathway — a way for species to track changing conditions and food sources, moving safely between the region’s remaining pockets of habitat rather than becoming stranded in an increasingly fragmented landscape.
A genuinely collaborative effort
B2B is an initiative of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and Great Eastern Ranges (GER), delivered on the ground by Lockyer Uplands Catchments Inc. (LUCI) — but the project’s strength lies in just how many hands are involved in delivering it. Over the past six months alone, LUCI and the B2B Project Coordinator have been working alongside Crows Nest Environmental, the High Country Koala Action Group, Leaftail Environmental, Killarney Bushcare, Friends of the Forest Somerset, the University of Southern Queensland and the Lockyer Valley Regional Council’s Resilient Rivers team — each contributing different expertise, equipment or on-ground capacity to the corridor.
This collaborative model extends to how the project is governed, too. A B2B Community Reference Group is currently being reviewed with the help of an independent consultant, with the explicit goals of strengthening partners’ sense of ownership over the initiative, sharpening coordination around the Conservation Action Plan’s priorities, and building a sustainability plan so the partnership can keep growing beyond the life of any single grant.
“The Bunyas to Border area is a vitally important section of the wider Great Eastern Ranges Corridor. Together with local partners led by the Lockyer Uplands Catchments Initiative and the continuing support of International Fund for Animal Welfare over eh last three years, GER is ensuring that a vital part of the wildlife migration ecology and natural climate adaptation ‘infrastructure’ of eastern Australia to be maintained.”
Gary Howling, CEO of Great Eastern Ranges
Community ownership, grown from the ground up
What makes B2B distinctive is how much of it is landholder- and volunteer-led. Community groups have taken on responsibility for hosting nest box monitoring sites, downloading and screening camera trap images, and delivering tree-planting events in partnership with local schools. One community group was moved to donate $1,000 towards tree planting after seeing the Conservation Action Plan, and a LUCI member has donated his own graphic design skills to produce promotional materials for the project — small but telling signs of a corridor that people feel is theirs.
That sense of ownership is showing up in the numbers, too. Since the project began, landholders across the corridor have planted thousands of native trees and shrubs, installed dozens of nest boxes and arboreal water stations, and hosted numerous community workshops and field days. Most recently, students, teachers and parents at Meringandan State School planted 200 trees, with further school plantings planned at Goombungee, Pilton, Mount Sylvia and Flagstone Creek State Schools — extending the corridor’s community reach to the next generation.
Eight species, one connected landscape
While the koala serves as B2B’s umbrella species, the project is designed around the habitat and movement needs of eight target species: the koala, greater glider, brush-tailed rock wallaby, grey-headed flying fox, glossy black-cockatoo, painted button-quail, speckled warbler and rainbow bee-eater. Between them, these species represent very different kinds of movement that a connected corridor needs to support — from koalas and gliders moving unimpeded between feed trees and shelter, to the long-distance, seasonal travels of migratory and nomadic birds and bats moving through the landscape in search of flowering and fruiting trees.
Rainbow Bee-eater – a common visitor and transiting migrant seen along the Bunyas to Border Corridor
A citizen science project developed this year with local field ecologist Mike Barth is a good example of how targeted the work has become. Nest boxes, each paired with a monitoring camera, have now been installed across three sites — Killarney, Mount Whitestone and Ravensbourne — specifically to confirm glossy black-cockatoo feeding and nesting behaviour, using a methodology designed to be picked up by other community groups along the corridor. Elsewhere, an expanded network of camera traps is tracking greater glider movement at Dingo Mountain, and Brush-tailed Rock Wallaby surveys are underway across four likely habitat areas in the Lockyer Valley.
Our flagship species: Australia’s iconic Koala
Looking south
With momentum building in the Lockyer, attention is now turning to what comes next: a proposed Greater Gondwana Rainforests Corridor that would extend B2B south across the Queensland–New South Wales border, linking protected areas including Mount Nothofagus, Nymboida and Guy Fawkes River National Parks. Drawing on the lessons and partnerships built through B2B, this next stage aims to knit together an aggregated 400 kilometres of connected habitat along the Great Dividing Range — a genuinely landscape-scale response to a landscape-scale problem.