Tweed Shire Council Two years ago, Tweed Shire Council teamed up with neighbouring Byron Shire Council to commence a four-year plan to aid the rapidly declining koala population. Dubbed the Koala Connections project, the initiative puts into action several measures to protect the iconic animal after a series of scientific studies deemed their situation to be “quite perilous.” Scott Hetherington is the Project Manager of Koala Connections. According to him, the origins of the $3.5 million program date back to 2011, when the council commissioned a detailed habitat study of the koalas on the Tweed Coast. “We found that they were in a very low number and in subpopulations that were disconnected from each other,” he recalls. “Realistically, their recovery wasn’t viable without intervention, so we embarked on a multipronged approach to address that, and one of those elements was to secure funding from the Australian Government to do this Koala Connections project.” “At that time, our neighbours in Byron Shire Council had undertaken a very simi-
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