Publications

Information about our past activities

According to section 19 of the Conservation and Land Management Act 1984, one of the functions of the Conservation and Parks Commission is to prepare and deal with proposed management plans for land and waters vested in or under the care, control and management of the Commission, whether solely or jointly with a joint responsible body.

Position Statements guiding the decison-making of the Commission on the management of vested lands and waters.

By section 19(1)(g) of the Conservation and Land Management Act 1986 (the Act), several of the functions of the Commission in relation to management plans for land and waters vested in or under the care, control and management of the Commission, whether solely or jointly with a joint responsible body are -

• to develop guidelines for monitoring; and
• to set performance criteria for evaluating; and
• to conduct periodic assessments of,

the implementation of the management plans by those responsible for implementing them, including the CEO (Department of Parks and Wildlife) and, if the land is State forest or a timber reserve, the Forest Products Commission.

This section provides documents regarding relevant policy, legislative requirements and additional resource information associated with management plans not relating to the forest management plans.

In 2005, a process was established to enable persons to request the Conservation and Parks Commission assess whether areas on the indicative timber harvesting plan should be classified as old-growth forest. This requirement was included in the Forest management plan 2004–13 following a high level of public concern that old-growth forest mapping was not founded on reliable data, and thus old-growth forest was potentially being harvested.

The Conservation and Parks Commission developed and approved in 2005 its Assessment criteria and process for the Conservation and Parks Commission review of old-growth amendments to guide reporting on these public nominations. A number of public nominations have been received and reported on to date. An old-growth forest nomination form should be filled out and lodged with the Conservation and Parks Commission to commence the application process. Please ensure all the details specified in the form are included with any nomination, as processing cannot commence without adequate detail.

The background to and context for these web-based reports can be derived from the following document: Assessment criteria and process for the Conservation Commission review of old-growth amendments.

The Conservation Commission is required under the Forest management plan 2004-13 (FMP) to examine certain forest reclassifications undertaken by the Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM), now Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC), between 1997 and 2001, from old-growth to non old-growth. Certain aspects in relation to the mapped appearance of the old-growth layer should be noted from the FMP, the assessment criteria document and the details below. Areas of mixed forest ecosystems:

• In the web-based reports, the Conservation Commission findings have been separated by forest type where mixed forest areas such as those classified as karri and jarrah occur within the same reclassified area (discrete polygon). This is due to the definitions for old-growth forest which differ for the main forest ecosystems.

 The mapped depiction (pixilation) of the old-growth layer:

• The DEC corporate database is represented graphically as a series of two hectare squares orientated in a north-south direction. The minimum scale that has been adopted for mapping old-growth forest by DEC, and the minimum scale to be utilized in the Conservation Commission assessment, is also two hectares. Furthermore, the old-growth layer in the DEC corporate database is a composite of attributing layers.  From the digital overlaying process of these attributing layers, and particularly on or near boundaries, the resulting mapped depiction of the old-growth reclassifications does contain a significant portion pixels of less than two hectares in size.  A contributing factor to this is that the old-growth reclassifications are represented as grid-based polygons and the boundaries depicted by these polygons can be shown as one or two sides of grid-squares (not smooth lines), running along the boundary line. In other words, the pixilated boundary has been used to represent a boundary line as a line of best fit.
• Appendix 3 of the FMP details the requirements in relation to field identification of old-growth forest patches identified in DEC's corporate database. Fieldwork needs to be undertaken by the proponent of any future adjacent field activities to determine the true boundary of forest represented by these pixels.
• Therefore, in summary, the recommendations in these web-based reports sometimes refer to polygon areas which are the mapped representation of a line of best fit in relation to boundaries. Boundary demarcation of the true or actual boundary will need to be undertaken by the proponent of any future field activities which are adjacent to old-growth forest boundaries. Implementation of these field measures will ensure that old-growth patches which are depicted as smaller than the minimum two hectare patch size, but are contiguous with old-growth forest (e.g. line of best fit pixels on a boundary line), will be accurately demarcated and protected in the field.