Located right on the southern border of Sydney, the Royal National Park is one of our city’s most easily-accessible and stunningly beautiful day trip destinations – a dreamy protected reserve spread across 15,091 magnificent hectares, right on the ocean. And while we always knew that the RNP was a safe bet for nature-lovers looking to find their fix (with some even spotting platypuses in the wild as a result of a recent conservation project), thanks to a new world-first scorecard-style survey, we now have a super accurate record of the creatures calling the RNP home.
Australia’s oldest national park (and the second-oldest national park in the world), the RNP has received its first health report, with the publication of an EcoHealth Scorecard. Designed to systematically integrate ecological health data (recorded by 40 permanent monitoring sites complete with cameras and acoustic monitoring) with financial data, the ‘park health scorecard’ system is a world first.
Based on findings from the first health report, things are looking good for Sydney’s RNP – with a diverse range of flora, ‘good’ or ‘very good’ water quality across 70 per cent of waterways, and a healthy population of animals, some of whom use the park as a refuge.
According to the scorecard, Sydney’s Royal National Park is home to 45 native mammal species and 488 native species of plants. The monitoring technology also identified the Krefft’s glider, the yellow-bellied sheath-tailed bat and the threatened eastern pygmy possum – with the cute marsupial thought to use the RNP as a refuge. Covering both the RNP and the adjacent Heathcote and Garawarra reserves, the permanent monitoring sites captured more than one million images, 2,500 bird records, and 2,000 plant records.
And though a good deal of the findings from this report are positive, the report also highlighted the challenges faced by native species in NSW. According to NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), six native mammal species are likely to have disappeared from the RNP since European settlement because of the impact of imported species such as deer and the red fox. In response to the results, the NPWS has ramped up control measures for feral animals, and new land management measures are being trialled.
“We can’t protect what we don’t know about, and this world-leading initiative puts science and data at the forefront of how we manage our iconic national parks,” NSW Environment Minister Penny Sharpe explained.
Keen to keep tabs on the health of our parks? A new report for the RNP will be published in mid-2025, and Kosciuszko National Park is set to receive its own scorecard soon. You can read the full scorecard report here.
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