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The 600-metre realignment and widening of Big Creek Road through Starlings Gap was undertaken without public consultation as required under state forestry regulations. Guidelines stipulate that new roads and upgrades are to be included in logging plans for public comment.
The road is a major artery for log trucks bringing timber out of the central highlands, but it is also used by campers and tourists travelling to the Ada Tree, one of the last ancient, mountain ashes left in the region after logging and the 1939 bushfires.
Leadbeater's possums were thought to be extinct but were "rediscovered" in 1961 nesting in burnt out trunks from the 1939 fires. They live in a few colonies but are threatened by the loss of nesting sites due to clearfell logging and the natural decay of the burnt trunks.
Conservationists say the roadworks have removed trees from a long-standing survey site for monitoring possum numbers, and compromised a special protection zone for possums and other threatened species set up under the region's Commonwealth-state Regional Forest Agreement.
They say works have degraded habitat by removing understorey vegetation and breaking the tree canopy connection which effectively isolates possums on either side of the road. They claim the road has been widened primarily to accommodate a larger class of log trucks, the B-doubles.
Questions to the Environment and Conservation Minister, Sherryl Garbutt, were answered by Gerard O'Neill, the director of forest services in the Department of Natural Resources and Environment.
Mr O'Neill said the road carried around 100,000 visitors by car and coach each year as well as being a route for logging trucks. He said it was being realigned for public safety after landslips in 1995 and 1998.
He said planning and construction was in accord with departmental procedures and the code of forest practices. He said there was no need to include it in the public consultation process for logging plans given it was within 250metres of the existing alignment. He said the realignment had not affected old growth or threatened species.
The code of forest practices stipulates that plans to upgrade the permanent road network should be outlined in the annual logging plans. It has no prescriptive widths; neither have the guidelines for the logging plans.
Australia's foremost expert on Leadbeater's possums, Dr David Lindemayer, who has done annual surveys at sites including Starlings Gap for nearly 20 years, said the outlook for the species was grim.
He said he feared the road widening was the beginning of accelerated
clearfelling in the central highlands, where already more than 80 per cent
of the mountain ash logs end up as woodchips.
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