Biolinks Support Grant

Applications open 13 July 2024
Applications close

Funding closed - all funds have been awarded for 2024 – 2025

Purpose To support the community to establish, protect, and enhance biolinks on a landscape scale by building upon and ultimately connecting vegetation to improve habitat values and provide pathways that facilitate wildlife movement.
Value

Eligible applicants may seek up to $10,000

   

What is a Biolink? 

A biolink, also known as a habitat corridor, links separate habitat patches and aims to support biodiversity by:

  • Reducing fragmentation by building upon and ultimately connecting habitat patches that have been subdivided, reduced and/or isolated.
  • Providing habitat for wildlife that can persist in narrow corridors, or use them for foraging, breeding or sheltering.
  • Providing pathways for individual animals to move between patches.
  • Facilitating genetic exchange between populations in isolated habitat patches, therefore reducing their risk of local extinction.
  • Enabling recolonisation of patches where species are locally extinct.
  • Enabling species to disperse to areas with more suitable climatic conditions in the face of climate change.

Biolinks have been found to effectively increase movement between patches for a broad range of species. Species that cannot move through unsuitable habitat or that rely upon metapopulation dynamics to recolonise habitat following population declines, are thought to benefit considerably from biolinks. 

Assessment

Applications will go through a two-step process:

  1. Initial Feasibility Assessment
  2. Detailed assessment using the Shire's Biolinks Decision Support Tool

Assessment Criteria

  • Engaging with the community and building stewardship
  • Facilitating biodiversity conservation on private land
  • Protecting biodiversity through planning and policy
  • Building a strong knowledge base
  • Demonstrating and leading best-practice land management
  • Building ecosystem resilience in a changing climate

Eligibility

Refer to program guidelines.

 Additionally, the following are ineligible for Biolink Support Grant funding:

  • Projects that include properties that are under 2ha in size
  • Projects where work sites are not adjacent to each other, or within reasonable distance from one another to effectively link or create viable biolinks
  • Projects on private land cannot be on one property, but must take place and link biolinks on multiple properties
  • Repeat projects in the same place
  • Projects that are unable to be assessed using the Biolinks Decision Support Tool.

Acquittal

  • Successfully funded projects/programs will receive a Funding Agreement.   All projects/programs, unless specifically funded for multiple years, must be completed by the end of the financial year in which they received the funding or in accordance with their Funding Agreement.  Extension for project delays need to be approved by the Program Manager .
  • The Funding Agreement will reference an Acquittal, which must be completed in full by the due date.