Community Engagement Team updates

Trivia Night

We are gearing up for our Trivia night to be held at the Civic Centre Supper room on Saturday 11 October from 6pm. This promises to be a great night of fun, fast flying facts and fearsome feuding between teams.

The theme will be Flora and Fauna of the Granite Belt , so get your fancy flora/fauna hat ready! Great prizes to be won.

BYO food but drinks (wine, beer, juice, soft drink) available for purchase – no BYO drinks.

Tables of 8 and $10 per head. Bookings available soon.

This is a major fundraiser for GBSAN to continue our projects, so make sure you get your team together.

Please contact Geraldine Community@gbsan.org.au if you can help out or donate raffle prizes.

Pub Chat

Keep Friday 6th September free for our next “Pub Chat”. Come along to the back area of O'Mara's pub to hear what is happening in GBSAN and feel free to contribute feedback or ideas. We will gather at 5pm. Please remember to book your own dinner at the pub if you want to stay on.

GBSAN Biodiversity – Landscape Linkages Project

Land For Wildlife Re-launch and Biodiversity/Biosecurity Officer with a Land for Wildlife component Proposal - We have not received any feedback at this stage from the Southern Downs Regional Council about whether this position will be funded in their next budget. We will keep you posted.

Funding for this position would provide on the ground support, education, networking and resources for landholders to strengthen biodiversity and biosecurity protection as well as assisting in agricultural sustainability and investment via nature tourism.

Feral Scan App

How are you going with using the Feral Scan app? It is very easy to use and provides much needed evidence to the Qld State Government to fund management strategies to control feral animals in our region.

GBSAN Bushcare Group

Weed Spotter's Network

Our GBSAN Bushcare group recently joined the Weed Spotter's Network. This provides us with fantastic support to identify and manage invasive weeds in our region as well as keeping us up to date with emerging weeds.

This is a citizen science intiative and is coordinated by the Qld State Government – Queensland Herbarium and Biosecurity Queensland.

We all know the devastating impact of invasive weeds on our biodiversity as well as agricultural production.

“Weed Spotters is an early detection system for emerging weed threats. Early detection is important as it is easier and less costly to eradicate an invasive species while the population is low and the area infested is small. Once an invasive species becomes established over a significant area, its population becomes highly resilient and difficult or impossible to eradicate.

The costs of managing the impacts increase as the population grows and spreads. Estimates of the annual cost of invasive plants to Queensland are around $600 million. No estimate has been made of the cost of weeds to the environment.

The Weed Spotters network of citizen scientists significantly boosts the surveillance capacity across the state, increasing the likelihood of early detection of high-risk weeds and the feasibility of successful eradication.”

We continued our weeding of the invasive weed Coreopsis at Goldfields Rd, Amiens to clear a rock platform rich in biodiversity. We are looking forward to returning there in spring/summer to see the results. Thinking of joining our Bushcare team? It's fun and we do manage to eat well at our morning teas!

We will be continuing our work with Friends of Parks with their monitoring of quoll numbers in Broadwater State Forest. Paul Revie, Senior Ecologist will be offering free training for interested GBSAN members on 6 July in Broadwater State Forest, to set up and collect data from these cameras as well as digital mapping skills. Let us know if you would like to be part of this exciting opportunity.

Contact us at community@gbsan.org.au if you have a project for the Bushcare group or would like to join the group.

Upcoming Bushcare date:

16 July at Greenlands

-Geraldine Hollingsworth, Convenor CET and Landscape Linkages