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RAFF Memorial Park Environmental Issues
There are several environmental management issues facing RAAF Memorial Park. Being in an urban setting and existing as an isolated stand of vegetation raises a few problems.
One issue is freqent fires. If you do the site walk of the park, take a look for any burnt patches, such as in the photo below, in the park.
Fires such as this usually don't get hot enough to harm the big trees, but can still kill all the plants in the understory and ground layers.
The vegetation found in the park is part of the Shale Plains Woodland community, a sub class of Cumberland Plain Woodland. This woodland occurs in the driest parts of the Sydney Basin and as a result, it is well adapted to drought and fire. However, in a natural setting bushfires do not occur very frequently. If they occur less then five years apart, some species have trouble coping.
A section of the Cumberland Plain Woodland found in the park.
Plants adopt several different strategies to survive fire. The plants found in the understory of this vegetation primarily use excessive seed production and underground tubers to regenerate after a fire. However, it takes time after a fire for the new plants to reach maturity and produce more seeds and tubers. If fires keep occuring before this happens then species loss can occurr.
Another problem is weeds. At present, weeds are a minor issue in the reserve, however there is evidence of garden waste that has been dumped with weed species growing in and around it. There is always the potential for weeds to invade isolated pockets of urban bushland such as this, so the efforts of local bushcare groups to keep the bushland weed free are very important.
