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Topic Grassland management
Question What is the impact of urban development on native grasslands?
Expert Neville Walsh
Neville Walsh is Senior Conservation Botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne. His work involves both plant identification and classification, and, conservation. Neville's roles include naming and describing new plant species and investigating how rare species can be conserved.
The basic impact is just loss of land that currently contains grasslands. I remember clearly when there were hundreds of hectares of grassland just to the west of Melbourne, and in what seemed like the blink of an eye, they were filled with factories and storage yards for all sorts of industries. Nowadays it’s more likely to be houses being built on the grasslands as Melbourne’s population continues to grow and spread out. Also, with more clearing and more houses and factories, there’s more ‘edges’ of grassland exposed, and these are the places where weeds (and rubbish) start to take over...
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