Mooloolah River National Park :: Sensing Environments :: Tricia King and Leah Barclay

Images by Dr Tricia King and sound by Dr Leah Barclay.

This experience is designed as a demo for Sensing Environments at USC Sunshine Coast featuring images and sounds from our first field trip. This is a creative response to the site and includes a Welcome to Country with Kabi Kabi Songman Lyndon Davis.

Mooloolah River National Park (Kabi Kabi Country) is one of the Sunshine Coast’s most significant protected coastal lowland habitats. Rapid development along the coast has left very few of these habitats intact. Those that remain have extremely high conservation value and are essential for the survival of local plants and animals.

The park’s coastal rainforest, melaleuca forests, wallum banksia woodlands, scribbly gum open forests, sedgelands and closed heaths are all threatened regional ecosystems.

Mooloolah River National Park’s plant communities are all threatened regional ecosystems. With its sandy soils the park is very sensitive to human impacts. Damage to ground surfaces can take many years to recover. Many of the parks plants are adapted to fire and some germinate only after fire but there is a fine balance between appropriate frequency of fire to maintain species diversity and too frequent or too hot fires that reduce diversity.