Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2022L00555:body:0:p74
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2022L00555
Segment Type: other
Provision Reference: 
Character Range: 230869–233878

and selection of environmental resources of the particular landscape in which individual Koalas, and the populations they belong to, live (functional ecology). These in turn are influenced by processes at other scales (e.g. fire, hydrology, vegetation clearance and climate change).
Tell-tale markings on bark made by the claws of a Koala. Image: © C. Robinson, CSIRO.
Koala habitat described in this recovery plan includes the total set of resources required by Koalas (above) to meet the needs of individual survival and reproduction, and the how those resources are arranged in the landscape to maintain viable metapopulation processes (i.e. it is landscape context dependent).
For an individual Koala, this includes access to sufficiently quality food and shelter trees to meet their daily energetic requirements and reproduction, and a safe place to avoid predators. Koala habitat includes forests or woodlands; roadside and railway vegetation and paddock trees; safe intervening ground matrix for travelling between trees and patches to forage and shelter and reproduce; and access to vegetated corridors or paddock trees to facilitate movement between patches. These resources fall within individual Koala's home ranges and allow for interaction with adjacent individuals.
For a population of the listed Koala, this means sufficient total amount of habitat of adequate quality to support a viable biological population where mortality, survival, and recruitment are balanced or recruitment increasing to optimal carrying capacity and within the bounds of natural fluctuations. Crucial habitat elements include patches and corridors for gene flow. On longer-time frames this includes climate refugia such as drainage lines, riparian zones and patches that are resilient to drying conditions due to favourable hydrological systems. Additionally, this includes areas which may be temporarily unoccupied, because of seral (maturity or time) changes to habitat quality that arise through processes such as fire, drought, timber harvesting or disease (shifting habitat mosaic) or degradation, and are available for future recolonisation.

25. Habitat critical to survival
Habitat critical to the survival of a species is the area that the species relies on to halt decline and promote the recovery of the species. Ideally this would be identified spatially; however, given the variety of factors that determine whether habitat is suitable for Koalas or not, it is more appropriate to define habitat based on the characteristics required to meet their needs, than by spatial delineation. Additionally, despite the multitude of schemes for assessing and mapping koala habitat, there are difficulties with such maps even at relatively small scales (e.g. Mitchell et al. 2021). At the expansive scale of the distribution of the listed Koala across much of Queensland and New South Wales, this is confounded by the absence of data on Koala distribution and abundance and consequently their habitat requirements in