The Importance of Wildlife Corridors This Summer

December 2025

How connected habitat keeps native animals safer, healthier, and more resilient during Australia’s hottest months

Summer in Australia follows a familiar script: climbing temperatures, long dry spells, restless heatwaves, and a rising bushfire threat. For our native wildlife, these conditions can be brutal. When habitat is broken into isolated pockets, animals lose the freedom to move, hide, cool down, and recover.

Wildlife corridors change that. A connected landscape is not just good ecology. It is life support. Corridors help animals escape danger, find food and water, and bounce back after fire or extreme weather. And as summers get hotter, the value of these living pathways rises fast.

Why Wildlife Corridors matter more in Summer

Corridors give wildlife options when conditions turn extreme

During heatwaves, animals move instinctively toward shade, water, and cooler pockets in the landscape. In heavily cleared or urbanised areas, those options often vanish.

Continuous habitat, even at a small scale, opens safe pathways that let:

Birds move between feeding and watering sites
Lizards and small mammals slip into shaded understorey
Pollinators track flowering resources
Nocturnal species cross open areas without overheating

Without these routes, animals can become trapped in baking habitat. Heat stress, dehydration, and reduced survival quickly follow.

Corridors improve survival during bushfires

Research from CSIRO and the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC shows that wildlife corridors:

Offer escape routes during fire
Shelter animals in cooler, damp refuges
Help species return and rebuild after the flames pass

Fragmented habitat leaves wildlife cornered with no safe exits. Connected habitat lets animals move around fire fronts and return once conditions settle. Even small plantings along streets or back fences add up, improving the odds of survival when fire strikes.

Corridors keep food and water within reach

Summer squeezes Australia’s natural food supply. Nectar dries up, insects retreat, seeds drop early, and freshwater shrinks.

Corridors create a chain of microhabitats where wildlife can move between:

Flowering shrubs
Shaded understorey
Water sources
Hollow-bearing trees

This mobility is often the difference between making it through the season or not.

Landscape elements that contribute to wildlife corridors

The diagram below from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water shows some important landscape elements contributing to wildlife corridors.

Wildlife Corridors Begin at Home

Large reserves matter, but most biodiversity loss happens on private land. That means every backyard, balcony, courtyard, or verge can play a role in stitching fragmented landscapes back together.

Small habitat patches connect into bigger ones. And those networks keep wildlife moving.

What you can do in your own yard

Shrubs and woody bushes

Create shade and shelter
Support small birds, skinks, insects, pollinators
Offer privacy and noise buffering

Trees, both living and dead

Living trees give food, cover, and nesting space
Safe standing dead trees provide hollows for birds and marsupials
Fallen logs feed fungi and boost soil nutrients

Leaf piles and compost

Skip the green bin. Instead:

Keep contained compost piles away from fire-prone edges
Encourage the insects and moisture that form microhabitats
Add veg scraps and eggshells to build soil health
Healthy soil leads to stronger plants and better habitat

Wildflowers and native groundcovers

Low maintenance
Nectar for pollinators
A base layer that supports the whole food web

Choose the right plants

Use tools like the GroNATIVE app, local nurseries, or SEEK / Google Lens to identify local species. Think about the wildlife you love most and plant for them.

Add water features

Shallow ponds or dishes
Stones or marbles for safe insect landings
Slow-moving water to reduce mosquito risk

If You Don’t Have a Yard

You can still help connect the landscape.

On a balcony

Native grasses in pots
Flowering shrubs in containers
Water dishes for birds and insects
Window decals to prevent bird strike
Bee bricks for solitary native bees

In the community

Join a community garden
Advocate for native vegetation in local parks
Encourage native plantings in apartment courtyards
Support wildlife-friendly verge projects

Each small patch strengthens the bigger network. And that network keeps wildlife breathing, moving, and surviving Australia’s toughest months.

How Wildlife Corridors Support Fire Safety

Well-designed corridors do more than protect wildlife. They help create safer, more resilient landscapes by:

Slowing wind, which can reduce fire spread
Giving animals safer escape routes
Breaking the landscape into moist, diverse patches that are harder for fire to sweep through
Helping ecosystems recover faster after a burn

At the landscape scale, we are already showing what successful wildlife corridors look like through projects such as the Bandicoot Superhighway in South Australia. Delivered in partnership with the Hills and Fleurieu Landscape Board, the Sturt Upper Reaches Landcare Group, the Nature Conservation Society of South Australia and the Australian Government, this community-led effort is reconnecting fragmented habitat for the endangered Southern Brown Bandicoot by creating a safe movement route through the Mount Lofty Ranges.

In just two years, the Bandicoot Superhighway delivered conservation outcomes across 216 hectares of priority habitat, restored and planted 34,699 native seedlings, and brought communities together through workshops, planting days and presentations attended by more than 900 people, including 215 hands-on volunteers.

The project also strengthened scientific knowledge. More than 110 bandicoot sightings were uploaded to a new citizen-science portal, supported by over 800 camera-trapping days across multiple properties. These records confirm how corridors help bandicoots move, forage and survive in increasingly fragmented landscapes.

The benefits reached well beyond ecology. The project invested over $211,000 into local biodiversity work and is projected to generate $1.3 million in economic activity within five years, showing how wildlife corridors support both nature and regional communities.

Working with landholders, partner organisations, community groups and government, we are demonstrating how restoring habitat connections reduces extinction risk, strengthens ecosystems and helps native wildlife move safely across the landscape. These connections matter even more during high-risk summer seasons when linked refuge zones can mean survival.

A Connected Landscape Is a Resilient Landscape

An incredible wildlife corridor north of the Rainforest Rangers working sites in the Atherton Tablelands. Photo credit: Steven Nowakowski

Wildlife corridors boost biodiversity, support water and soil health, improve fire resilience, and give native species a real chance in a warming world.

This summer and every summer ahead, the most powerful action we can take is simple: connect the habitat around us. Stitch together yards, balconies, verges, parks, and bushland. Build pathways. Build refuge.