Conserving Bushland

National parks alone can’t do it. South Australia’s remnant native vegetation must also be safeguarded through private ownership and stewardship, or we will lose more precious habitats for ever.

Nature Foundation SA is working to conserve bushland on both public and privately held land. We do this in three main ways.

  • Operating Bushbank SA – a fund established with Commonwealth and State Government money to buy private property with habitat value, protect it and on-sell it to private owners who care.

  • Raising funds for the purchase of land to establish or extend national parks, conservation parks and wetlands.

  • Managing land donated to us for restoration and revegetation.

Why is it important?

There is now widespread recognition of what conservationists have known for years - we have cleared far too much land in South Australia and lost precious native plant and animal communities in many regions.

The inevitable competition between wildlife and agriculture has seen wildlife steadily decline. Many natural wetlands were drained before we understood their vital importance to our ecology.

Our most arid deserts, thought to be ecological wastelands, have proved to sustain the last populations of some incredibly tough plants and animals not previously recorded.

And much of our remaining native vegetation occurs as small, scattered remnants, often on shallow, rocky and less-productive soils. As corridors of bushland have been interrupted, small birds, reptiles, animals and insects have been isolated and their numbers fallen, often all the way to extinction.

The Nature Foundation helps:

  • fund surveys that identify and discover the distribution of some of our rarest plants and research so we can better understand their ecology

  • prevent the spread of Dieback through Kangaroo Island’s wilderness areas

  • protect grasslands that contain the only populations of our most threatened reptile - the Pigmy Blue Tongue Lizard

  • extend the national park system, working with Governments to make the most of financial, scientific and volunteer resources

  • help bird care groups conserve natural hollows in old growth trees so birds and insects can thrive

  • support many regional ecology projects, like the community biodiversity initiative Ark on Eyre