Under the Wilderness Act 1987, the Director-General of the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) is responsible for the identification and protection of wilderness in NSW. Since 1989, the Director-General has identified 21 areas of forested wilderness in the IAP study area, most of which are situated along the Great Escarpment and in the Southern Alps.
Boundaries of identified wilderness were digitised from topographic maps (usually 1:25,000) and validated against the assessment reports. Priority was given to wilderness outside existing reserves. The boundaries of the identified Coolangwara Wilderness (NPWS 1989) were not digitised. Recent intensive disturbance has invalidated the identification of this area as wilderness.
The Australian Heritage Commission (AHC) recently completed the NSW component of the National Wilderness Inventory (NWI). The NWI uses information regarding the location of roads, settlements, apparent naturalness and biophysical naturalness to create a broad-scale map of wilderness quality (Lesslie & Maslen 1995). For the purpose of the IAP, NWI wilderness was defined as all those areas larger than 8000 ha which have a wilderness quality level of 12 and above.
The Commonwealth proposed the following broad criterion for the inclusion of wilderness in the DFA process:
90 per cent, or more wherever practicable, of the areas of high quality wilderness that meet minimum area requirements be protected, and no activity undertaken inside or adjacent to that area that would reduce the NWI rating of the wilderness areas.
The Commonwealth's wilderness criterion has been interpreted as being the inclusion of 90% of NWI wilderness in the protected layer.
Current NSW Government policy is to protect all forests within identified wilderness from logging until the end of the Comprehensive Regional Assessment (CRA). As such, all 'identified wilderness areas' are with the protected layer in the IAP except in the Eden region.
In the development of outcomes in the Eden region, Nadgee State Forest already identified as wilderness was not included in the protected layer at the beginning of the negotiations.
No reservation target was set for the additional (or 'provisional') wilderness areas identified in the IAP wilderness project and they were not part of the protected layer.
The IAP Wilderness Project aimed to review existing data sets associated with the Commonwealth NWI. A rapid desktop assessment was carried out on areas of NWI wilderness, meeting NWI 12 and >8000 ha, outside existing identified wilderness areas and outside the existing reserve system. These areas were further assessed using the criteria of the NSW Wilderness Act 1987 as outlined in the draft Wilderness Assessment Manual (NPWS 1995). Areas which were assessed as meeting these criteria were used to create a 'provisionally identified wilderness' (PIW) layer.
The AHC provided NPWS with the NWI data sets. Areas with NWI wilderness quality (WQ) greater or equal to 12 were extracted into a separate layer. Another layer was created comprising contiguous areas larger than 8000 ha with WQ12.
The methodology used to complete the rapid desktop assessment of the NWI wilderness is summarised below.
A total of ten areas adjacent to existing identified wilderness areas and eight new areas have been included in a data layer of 'provisionally identified' wilderness as shown in Table 3.4
If all public lands in the provisionally identified wilderness layer are protected and added to the existing protected tenure layer, 93% of the NWI wilderness is covered. This meets the Commonwealth's target of 90% inclusion. The level of possible protection however, varies between sub-regions. In addition, given the differences in time between the NWI assessment and release of results, areas of NWI wilderness especially in the N2 and S2 sub-regions have not been incorporated in provisionally identified wilderness due to recent timber harvesting or roading. Less than 80% of NWI wilderness in these negotiation regions still qualifies as wilderness.
Table 3.4 Provisionally identified wilderness areas.
SUB-REG NAME OF PIW IDW AREA
ION ADDITION (HA)
N2 Chandlers - 14 132
Creek
N3 Stockyard - 12 452
Creek
N3 Carrai State Macleay 807 +
Forest Gorges 34
(2 areas)
N3 Doyles River Werrikimbe 10 023
State Forest
N3 Thumb Creek New 408
State Forest England
N4 Barrington Barrington 1572
Tops State Tops
Forest
N5 Gibraltar Bindery 3097
Range State (Mann)
Forest
N6 Styx River Macleay 4242 +
State Forest Gorges 693
(2 areas)
N6 Mummel Gulf - 12 277
S1 Macdonald Budawang 1276
State Forest
S1 Buckenbowra - 18 863
S2 Bungonia - 22 463
S2 Bundanoon - 16 965
E Werrinook Brogo 219
Flora
Reserve
T Brindabella - 15 581
(2 areas) + 5353
The Project report recognised that the NWI data set will need to be revised to incorporate disturbance history records. This will be undertaken in the CRA. The report also recommends field assessment to confirm the identification of all areas in the 'provisionally identified wilderness' data layer as wilderness.