Fauna of the Boyne Smelters Ltd buffer zone: A report to Boyne Smelters Ltd

In 1994 Boyne Smelters Ltd asked the Centre for Land and Water Resource Development at Central Queensland University to develop a five year management strategy (and associated monitoring regime) for the buffer zone surrounding the aluminium smelter on Boyne Island, near Gladstone in Central Queensland. The initial stage in this process is a description of the biological systems operating within the buffer zone. The first report in this stage (Melzer et al. 1995) mapped the vegetation and identified the major plant communities present. This, the second report, describes the fauna associated with these plant communities. The lists of animals presented here are not intended to be comprehensive. More intensive trapping in different seasons, using different methods, would have identified other species of small mammals (particularly bats) while intensive searching of the leaf litter would have extended. the list of cryptic invertebrates. The lists are, however, intended to provide some indication of the complexity of the animal assemblage using the buffer zone and to provide the resources for decisions to be made on management and monitoring regimes. Further, the plant communities and the animal assemblages which inhabit them can not be managed independently from each other and this report should be used in conjunction with the report on vegetation.