Qualla: Jarrah Forest

Jarrah Forest: Introduction

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The chuditch was once the largest carnivorous marsupial in southwestern Australia, ranging across 70 percent of the mainland. It now occupies just 2 percent. That single statistic captures the story of the Jarrah Forest: a place of extraordinary biological richness that has been cleared, mined, logged, and infected until what remains is both precious and precarious. Stretching across 4.5 million hectares of southwestern Western Australia, the Jarrah Forest bioregion takes its name from the dominant canopy tree, jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata), whose hard red timber built colonial Perth and whose laterite-rich soils now yield the bauxite that global aluminium markets demand.

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Image: Public domain

Jarrah Forest: The Plateau and the Scarp

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SDavies, CC BY-SA 3.0. The bioregion sits atop the 300-metre Yilgarn Block, an ancient inland plateau with the Darling Scarp forming its dramatic western edge above the Swan Coastal Plain. The scarp generally marks the bioregion's boundary, though the forest extends west to Cape Naturaliste. To the sou...

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Image: SDavies | CC BY-SA 3.0

Jarrah Forest: A Canopy of Survivors

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Orderinchaos, CC BY-SA 3.0. Beneath the jarrah canopy, bull banksia, sheoak, snottygobble, and woody pear form a mid-storey that shelters some of the continent's rarest creatures. The numbat, Gilbert's potoroo, woylie, tammar wallaby, western ringtail possum, and red-tailed phascogale all depend on this for...

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Image: User:Orderinchaos | CC BY-SA 3.0

Jarrah Forest: Death from Below

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Amanda Slater from Coventry, West Midlands, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. Phytophthora cinnamomi, an introduced soil-borne pathogen, is killing the Jarrah Forest from its roots upward. The disease forms lesions that begin in the root system and climb the stem, and in many species, there is no recovery. More than 22 percent of the forest's plant species...

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Image: Amanda Slater from Coventry, West Midlands, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

Jarrah Forest: The Bauxite Conflict

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Author: Laurenç MARSOL., CC BY-SA 4.0. Alcoa has mined bauxite in the Jarrah Forest since the 1960s, and the scale of the operation has provoked sustained public opposition. Scientists from the Leeuwin Group warned in 2023 of an "extinction catastrophe" if mining continued unchecked. The Environmental Protection Autho...

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Image: Author: Laurenç MARSOL. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jarrah Forest: Islands of Refuge

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. Conservation efforts have carved protected areas from the mining leases and farmland that surround the remaining forest. Dryandra Woodland shelters more than half the world's known numbat population. The Walpole Wilderness Area, established in 2004, encompasses several national p...

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Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0