This Digest updates another from 2013 that featured Donaghy’s Corridor in tropical northern Australia and its role in re-connecting an isolated tropical forest fragment to a large reserve through cattle pasture, engaging landholders, government, academics and community to ecologically restore the connection, and implementing rigorous flora and fauna monitoring.
Twenty years ago, John Donaghy, the landholder who donated 25 acres of his land to establish what is now Donaghy’s Corridor Nature Refuge, set an example which paved the way for other large corridors to be re-planted in north Queensland’s Wet Tropics (see EMR Project Summary). Since its completion in 1998, Donaghy’s Corridor has served as a model of effective conservation. However, recent conservation efforts to protect one species within the region have obstructed overall habitat connectivity in the corridor.
Queensland’s State government has recently allowed Rainforest Reserves Australia (RRA), the landholder directly upstream of Donaghy’s Corridor, to erect double-mesh fencing that blocks the corridor to terrestrial mammals, most reptiles and amphibians, fish, and other aquatic wildlife including platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus). RRA has established a commercial rehabilitation facility for the endangered southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius johnsonii), 
but in doing so have ‘fenced in’ the western end of the corridor and included that in a predator-proof enclosure. Native animals inside the area when it was fenced are now trapped inside, and those whose territories encompassed the fenced area displaced, in addition to the barrier effect imposed on the corridor itself.
Conservation biologists have long known the perils of single-species conservation. Whilst iconic species such as cassowaries are useful in harnessing public support for conservation, they can, paradoxically, attract non-scientific, commercially-focused organisations who then access limited conservation funding and put pressure on governments to sanction poor conservation practice. This leads to confusing recommendations, as the same government’s promotional material on cassowary conservation urges landholders to establish corridors as the first step in protecting the bird.
The take home message for conservation is that even when exemplary projects such as Donaghy’s Corridor are established, competing conservation goals and practices can jeopardize the ecological system as a whole.
