Melbourne’s water supply is at risk because decades of logging and forest loss from large bushfires has triggered the imminent collapse of the mountain ash forests in Victoria’s central highlands, ecologists have said. Either option — a young and growing mountain ash forest or an acacia woodland — would be potentially disastrous for Melbourne’s water supply, he said. The majority of Melbourne’s water catchments are in mountain ash forests, which are either protected in national parks or in state forests where logging is either allowed or has previously occurred. In the Upper Thomson catchment, which feeds Melbourne’s largest water supply dam, the Thomson reservoir, about 61% of the trees have been logged. “My hope is that at some stage people will wake up and say, ‘Oh my god, that’s the water supply for 4.5 million Melburnians,’” Lindenmayer said.

Source: The Guardian April 30, 2018 18:56 UTC