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If conservation depends on people, then community partnerships are the lynchpin to conservation success. The contribution of local knowledge, intellectual capital and volunteer labour not only saves project managers invaluable time and money, it fosters ownership and longevity into conservation initiatives well beyond their projected timeframe. Island communities are socially and culturally diverse and driven by a range of motivations. Hence, if we are to deliver conservation programs at scale, we need to better understand and embed these drivers into program design. We present four contemporary case studies on major populated islands in Australia where community collaborations are building the collective impact needed to underpin conservation success. They contain key learnings about community involvement, to help guide managers with future island planning and avoid some pitfalls.

The Masked Owl Tyto novaehollandiae was introduced to Lord Howe Island in the 1920s to control an irruption of the Black Rat Rattus rattus. The owl is a threatened species in New South Wal...

Effectively controlling invasive species on islands is a critical aspect of global conservation. Having the potential to outcompete or consume native species, it is particularly important to remove them from islands harbouring unique flora and fauna. Lord Howe Island, a World Heritage listed area to the east of the Australian mainland, is in the midst of a long-term weed management project, where the most prolific invasive species is cherry guava, with over 700,000 plants removed so far. In such projects, it is critical to have a good understanding of the invasion dynamics and removal process to have reliable estimates of project timeline and success, and to ensure the best removal strategies are being utilised. In this paper we model cherry guava growth, spread and removal on Lord Howe Island, fitting our model to 12 years of removal data. Our mean estimate is that there are 102,091 plants remaining on the island, which will take approximately 25 years to remove at current levels of eradication effort. Altering the strategy to search every year, rather than biennially, reduces the eradication time to 20 years, which falls within the project target, while also decreasing the total search effort. However, simply increasing search effort to finish faster actually increases the total eradication effort. This shows that the benefits of making careful adjustments to a strategy can far out-weight the benefit of simply investing more money into control. This project exemplifies how high-quality removal record-keeping can be used to generate models that provide important long-term forecasts of project success and suggest effective strategic improvements.

Restoring the rainforests of the Big Scrub is a powerful restoration symbol for the regional communities of far north coast New South Wales, but it is only a partly realized aspiration. What progress has been made in 35 years and to what extent is the aspiration achievable?