Biodiversity - overview

The Murray Catchment Management Authority (CMA) works with landholders and other agencies to manage and conserve the biodiversity of the NSW Murray Catchment. The diverse landscapes of the NSW Murray catchment support a significant array of natural biodiversity, including many terrestrial and aquatic threatened plants and animals, some of which are not found anywhere else in Australia.

The region's biodiversity is under considerable pressure from a range of threats including clearing of native vegetation, overgrazing, pest plants and animals and removal of fallen timber and many of its species, populations and ecological communities are in decline. The Murray Catchment has 7 endangered ecological vegetation communities and over 110 threatened plants and animals.

Murray CMA currently invests in a range of biodiversity projects including providing funding for landowners to protect and enhance their native vegetation, targeted programs of pest and weed control on both public and private land and projects that focus on recovery of threatened species such as corroboree frogs and the bush stone-curlew.

Decisions about where and how to invest in maintaining and improving the biodiversity in the NSW Murray catchment are important to ensure that funding is achieving the right outcomes in the most cost efficient way. The Murray CMA is currently developing the NSW Murray Biodiversity Management Plan to help guide how we invest in biodiversity in our region.

Murray CMA is also committed to monitoring the work we do to ensure that the investment we make is producing the outcomes we want over the longer term. One component of the CMA's biodiversity monitoring program is a partnership with the Australian National University on the Biodiversity Monitoring Project. This is a large-scale, long-term project that is monitoring vegetation and wildlife at over 250 sites across the Murray Catchment to determine changes in biodiversity over time and the factors contributing to these changes.

For more information on our biodiversity program please contact one of our biodiversity team members.