Heritage Agreement - track and fence maintenance
This is a basic overview on the role of maintaining tracks to ensure ongoing access and the monitoring and delineation of roads and fencelines, these being smaller tasks associated with managing our heritage land.
It is important to keep the designated tracks clear and easily accessed, as this encourages others who access their properties through ours to stay on the tracks and not create their own as they navigate around fallen timber, widening the track and causing damage to the surrounding vegetation and binding soil crust.
Much of the soil in the area has a clay base that, when wet, becomes heavy going and sticky. Minor deviations when boggy will leave deep gulches for many years. These ruts encourage the collection of weed seeds and prevent the biophilic soil crust from repairing itself.
Track and fence maintenance is an ongoing job, but not a significant effort on a property as small as 16:6, which has a boundary fence of only 16 km and a track network of around 4.5 km. Much of the track access is on adjacent landholders’ properties or parts of existing scheduled roads on maps, some of which only exist on a map and are little more than two-wheel tracks.
The image below illustrates the four sections of land that comprise the 16:6 Heritage agreement area, with the original blue section delineation. ( image from NatureMaps)
The overlayed and colour-coded fences show colours to reflect the fence that we maintain, unmaintained fences, and areas with no fencing, as well as the tracks that exist that we maintain and tracks that are owned or managed by other landholders or Crown Lands (including those mapped in government gazettal's but not constructed)
Frequency of track work - We drive tracks approximately every 6 to 8 weeks, as we check remote cameras and undertake other property maintenance tasks.
Some of the more distant tracks we may only drive each quarter, as we have established Photopoint ( Photopoint post) to allow for seasonal vegetation records, and we have erected possum/bat/bird boxes in several areas where the property tracks terminate.
One of the tasks we have addressed, and will continue to focus on is ensuring that any unused tracks are closed and can be rehabilitated. One of the images below is of a neighbouring property 'Ellua" who closed numerous track over ten years ago. These tracks are now stable with biological crusts, plants recruited and in some places deep litter.
Closing tracks involves intentionally placing trees, rocks, and road closed signs across the tracks. We have identified four internal tracks and closed these, as well as placing barriers on several illegal (Unknown persons) tracks, in total returning approximately 40 acres of land to conservation.
Vehicles used on the property need to remain on the designated tracks, as although our land is not a National Park with critically sensitive areas, it is still important to respect it in any way that we can. The importance lies in the need to minimise damage to vegetation.
Driving off-track can crush delicate plants, disrupt root systems, and crush seedlings, hindering their growth and potentially leading to habitat destruction. Vehicles can cause soil erosion, leading to track widening, landscape scarring, and sediment runoff into waterways. Additionally, they can disturb animal habitats, disrupt nesting sites, and spread invasive plant species.
None of the 16:6 fences face public access roads, and they are not in place for stock control, so maintaining them as a physical barrier is not a priority. As such, repairs to fences and monitoring for fallen trees are typically performed about once a year, or when deemed necessary.
Fence repair work primarily involves cutting and removing fallen trees from the alignment.
Extreeme wind in the Mallee and the nature of the eucalyptus to sacrifice a limb for the greater tree stability result in numerous fallen limbs and branches over fences and tracks.
Sometimes we can cut the fallen branches, or remove obstructions, stand the fence up again and add a star dropper where necessary to give it some stability. The ground is not very friendly for fencing with limestone and calcrete sheets just beneath the surface, as well as a heavy termite population, which can destroy an untreated fence post in short order.
Standing existing fencelines up to ensure a physical delineation from passing vehicles and to limit illegal access.
Images of repairing and manitaining the existing fencelines
One task that we undertook, which has not been hugely successful, was placing yellow plastic, UV-resistant caps on the standing fence, one per 50 metres.
The purpose is to assist us or anyone when navigating to recognise a 16:6 fence line and route accordingly. This has not worked very well, as the so-called UV-stabilised star picket toppers seem to deteriorate in about 24 months, splitting apart and adding to the plastics in the environment. Like many aspects of the work we all do, we learn as we go!.
Over time we will be additng to this post to include more on the original delineation, old maps from the last century as well as details on how we walked the original survey points finding piles and lines created with limestone rocks iver 100 years ago by surveyers.