SA Museum: Our Biodiversity Gallery - (Part 2) Suburban Biodiversity with Keith Conlon in the Adelaide City region of South Australia

The SA Museum is one of the grandest buildings on our stately North Terrace. And within its walls are more than 150 years worth of valuable collections. Of course, like all great public institutions, it's ever evolving and the latest addition is the new Biodiversity Gallery, which takes up the entire second floor. It's a mix of traditional taxidermy, state of the art synthetic modelling and electronic displays - offering a slice of all our living animals and plants - from the arid far north right down to the coast and everything in between.

The new gallery is the work of an army of museum staff who carry on the tradition of research and collecting that began over 150 years ago. Over the decades, the field techniques might have modernised but the aim remains the same - to record, study, understand and help preserve our part of the natural world - that means our living biodiversity.

To help us with that, the new gallery is peppered with plenty of multi-media - including a lesson from Chris Daniels, Professor of Urban Ecology at the University of South Australia. He helps to put the whole biodiversity thing into context… like what's happened since the first Europeans arrived way back in 1836.

Chris: "In the first seventy years of it's development Adelaide grew at an amazing rate. By the 1870s Adelaide had over 77,000 people, by the start of the 20th century Adelaide was a sprawling city that covered the plains. Most of the remnant vegetation had been cleared and Adelaide was a hot dry and dusty place in the summer and cold and wet in the winter. It was an unattractive city. To deal with this problem the state government and council hired a quiet unassuming German arborist named Augusta Pelzer. And it was his job to line the streets of Adelaide with trees. He would choose local natives or introduced trees from Europe or Africa. These street trees had given Adelaide its character and they provided habitat for a whole array of different animals. And now Adelaide is a forest - in fact the city is one of the largest forests in the state. "

That includes areas like the parklands - one of the things that make Adelaide such an attractive place to live. We use them in lots of different ways - for sport, leisure or simply for nature.

Volunteer: "I am a volunteer with trees for life and they supervise us in regenerating things. So we weed around good things by weeding a little 15-cm front around it and then let it re-generate. The whole purpose of wanting to regenerate the native plants is to increase biodiversity. That includes everything that's alive in the area and ideally we will be encouraging things like the spiders to survive, moths and butterflies. And there are believe it or not snakes, lizards, all sorts of things in the parklands and what we're doing there is providing a habitat for them.

"We're not putting them there, we're not asking them to come in but if they're here, they've got somewhere safe to go and keep away from humans which is what they prefer. That's the whole purpose of it. It's not just to have a few grasses, it's to have biodiversity in total."

But it's not just our parklands and our backyards that provide habitats for animals in the city. Don't forget places like golf courses, railway verges, vacant blocks and commercial sites, and surprisingly our local cemeteries.

Chris: "In places like this we have lots of old trees and hollows that provide shelters for bats, for possums and many of the birds will use the plants that grow here and the trees for shelter. So these regions become vital for supporting populations of animals that couldn't exists elsewhere in the city."

But what about the 'burbs' I hear you ask. What happens in housing areas with little or no open space? Windsor Street in Unley is a good solution. Here the residents and the council have agreed to narrow the road and use the footpath to create a mini biodiversity region, which attracts birds, frogs, reptiles and all matter of insects. This really is our biodiversity at our front door.

South Australian Museum
North Tce
Adelaide

Published 21st February 2010