Alexandrina Council is known nationally and internationally as a region of environmental importance and natural beauty. Its landscape is highly diverse and includes significant environments such as: rocky coastlines, open sandy beaches and dune systems, forests, mallee forests, Lake Alexandrina, the Murray Mouth, the Goolwa Channel, several creeks, wetlands, and catchment areas.

Each of these landscapes provides a home to unique plant and animal species that rely on these natural environments for their survival.

The effective protection and enhancement of biodiversity assets on Council land requires:

• both project initiation and ongoing management activities to be properly resourced
• threatening processes to be identified, prevented, and reduced
• collaboration with the community conservation sector, government agencies, adjacent landholders, and the wider community.

Council prioritises the location and level of biodiversity management on land under our care and control in accordance with the following hierarchy:

• the protection, maintenance, and then enhancement of remnant vegetation with its flora and fauna
• restoring sites that have been degraded
• revegetating open space to reconstruct habitat elements that have been lost (i.e. buffers, corridors, verges, and urban greening).

Alexandrina Council continues to protect our species and ecosystems and to help increase the resilience of our local ecosystems. Actions to maximise our potential to halt or slow the existing trend of biodiversity decline, such as:

• protecting and improving the condition of remnant native vegetation on land and waters under Council’s care and control;
• increasing the tree canopy cover in our townships and conservation areas;
• protecting our threatened flora and fauna species;
• acknowledging and supporting First Nations peoples’ management of land and sea;
• collaborating across government agencies
• supporting, and adding value to, biodiversity works undertaken by the many community conservation groups and volunteers working within our Council area;
• educating our community and landholders about the value and management of biodiversity on Council and private land; and
• ongoing advocacy for the care and conservation of our natural assets and biodiversity.

Read our Environmental Action Plan here.

To find out more, click on the links below.