To Members of the International Mire Conservation Group: Re Visiting Fraser Island 26th to 29th November 2013

Organisers: John Sinclair

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The Patterned Peatlands of Fraser Island : a briefing

Richard Lindsay, University of East London

Fraser Island is the largest sand island in the world, and lies off the east coast of Queensland north of Brisbane. Sand is deposited onto the east coast of Fraser Island creating huge mobile dunes, while the centre of the island is dominated by sub-tropical forest nourished by fungal communities within the sand. The western side of Fraser Island consists of ancient dunes which are strongly leached, and thus the vegetation tends towards a shorter heath-type community. In places along this west coast, however, and also in places on the adjoining Queensland coast, peat-forming systems have developed. These were first recognised as such by Richard Lindsay (then Chair of IMCG) and David Stroud (UK Ramsar Committee) during a post-Conference tour of Ramsar CoP 6 in 1996, the tour being organised by John Sinclair, once voted Australian of the Year for his work in stopping industrial-scale sand mining across the island.

The following year, a small group organised by the Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS), and including Richard Lindsay, re-visited a few of the identified sites in order to begin characterising the natural heritage significance of the sites. The AMCS was interested in these sites because water leaving the sites flowed directly into the coastal mangrove systems and the AMCS felt that there may thus be an important functional link between the peatlands and the mangroves. This first reconnaissance visit identified from aerial photographs that there were many examples distributed along the west coast of Fraser Island, but also that there were several systems scattered along the east coast of Queensland although almost all these were under pressure from coastal development. In contrast, the Fraser Island examples appeared to be virtually pristine. The aerial photos also revealed that there were two distinct types of peatland – one forming a classic string-mire pattern and thus almost certainly minerotrophic, whereas the other pattern more closely resembled the pool pattern typical of an ombrotrophic bog. The survey established that the main peat-forming species was Empodisma minus, that the ‘bog’ pools did indeed resemble bog pools but it was not possible during the visit to establish whether the mire was an ombrotrophic dome or not, and that the string fens consisted of narrow peat ridges 70 cm high, 50 cm across, with lengths of 100 m+, separated by ‘flarks’ of bare sand with a thin organic deposit. The ‘bog pools’ were also found to contain minute fish, while the peatlands as a whole were found to be the haunt of the rare ground parrot.

In the last couple of years, more detailed studies of certain sites has been undertaken by Russell Fairfax and his team from the Queensland Herbarium, and by a team acting for the Burnett Mary Regional Group, headed by Patrick Moss and John Tibby. These reports will doubtless form the main background to the 2013 visit and so will not be elaborated on here, but they show that fire has played a significant part in the history of these sites, which are now dated as having begun development between 12,000 and 4,000 years ago depending on the site, with maximum peat depths reaching just over 3 m in deepest parts of the ‘bog’-like systems but less than 1 m in other areas and in more fen-like systems. There are now a good palynological and micro-charcoal data to go with the data for current biodiversity. Gross hydrology and hydromorphology, and to some extent hydro-chemistry, still require further investigation, as does the functional relationship between these sites and the surrounding landscape (heath, forest, mangroves).