LAST Thursday, 19 September ‘citizen scientists’ from the Forest Ecology Alliance (FEA) and concerned community members gathered at Little Newry State Forest for a sit-in.

Forestry Corporation of NSW (FCNSW) logging operations are scheduled to begin in Little Newry within the next six months, with the FEA and other conservation groups eager to highlight the impact of biodiversity loss in local state forests.

Sit-in attendees sat in a semi-circle a metre apart for three hours in quiet protest, while visitors had the opportunity to speak with citizen scientists about the forest’s biodiversity.

A ‘yarning circle’ was also held, with participants sharing what forests mean to them.

A spokesperson for FEA told NOTA that citizen scientists have been hard at work documenting the state forest’s flora and fauna.

“Citizen scientists often wait together all night for a glimpse of gliders leaving den hollows, scramble down steep slopes and crawl back up them, battle through lantana and lawyer vine, carry countless ticks and leeches, slip their way along mossy creek beds, scrape through tonnes of leaf matter searching for koala scats, and hug trees only to measure them in the hope that this forest won’t be chopped down,” they said.

“Citizen science is not for the faint hearted.

“It’s not easy observing species decline unfold, but the hardest part is watching the logging of life-sustaining forest habitats.

“We grow to love the forests we survey, then we see them reduced to bare dirt.”

According to the FCNSW harvest portal, of the sections of Little Newry SF destined for logging operations, 192 hectares (36 percent of the total area) has been mapped for “permanent protection in conservation areas that are identified for important ecological and habitat values”.

By Andrew VIVIAN