Paperlinx Green Shareholders' Group

Buffer Zones

Buffer Zones are required to protect streams and watercourses, to act as water filters, and to protect rainforest.

The Code specifies minimum widths for buffer zones. In many situations, especially on erodible soils and steep slopes, prudent practice would suggest wider zones.

The Code of Forest Practices, Section 3.2.3 Water Quality Protection includes the following:
Goal: Measures must be taken to control timber harvesting operations in the vicinity of streams, drainage lines, springs, soaks, swampy ground and bodies of standing water, in order to protect them and their associated riparian vegetation from disturbance and exposure that could reduce their water quality.

Minimum buffer zones for the most robust soils are

permanent streams 20m
temporary streams 10m
drainage lines 10m
wetlands 20m

Greater buffers are required on fragile soils, particularly on steeper slopes of from 20 to 30 degrees. Buffer and filter strips must be measured in the horizontal plane from the edge of the channel of saturated zone.

We see instead gullies and watercourses being totally logged.
Also buffers of less than the recommended minimum width.
This must aggravate gully erosion
It also removes the ground cover which should act as a filter to stop much of the sediment washed off disturbed slopes above from entering watercourses.

	Here we see a man standing in a deep erosion ditch. Logging has proceeded into this steep sided gully without any buffer being left. Any substantial rains will further erode this already deep ditch. Photo Strzeleckis: Traralgon South, Red Hill Road Source: FOGB
	The close up makes it clearer just how deep the erosion ditch is. For each metre of length of this gully over 2 tonnes of earth has been swept downstream. Photo Strzeleckis: Traralgon South, Red Hill Road Source: FOGB

In some areas rainforest is actually logged, or left without any buffer zone. Rainforest which is opened to wind and sunlight dies. Rainforest cannot be regenerated, as it requires at least several hundreds of years to develop.

Buffers as Wildlife Corridors

The logging industry tends to include even inadequate buffer zones that are retained into its estimates of habitat for native flora and fauna.

As these buffer zones are very long and narrow they are subject to invasion by feral plant and animal species arriving from the adjoining damaged areas.
The buffers along streams and protecting rainforest are important as corridors for wildlife and plant movement between more substantial refuge areas.

They are generally too narrow to provide effective hunting territories on their own, or to provide for population of sizes which minimise inbreeding.

They should not be included in habitat calculations, as is often done by loggers, unless they are generous in width.

Jeeralang Creek, buffers, slopes, re-routing Here, in the Jeeralang Creek we have logging on steep slopes, no effective buffers. Debris in the stream has caused the stream to re-route itself across the sediment fan above the junction.
Photo Strzeleckis: Jeeralang Creek
Source: FOGB

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