Kings Plains catastrophic floods - please help if you can

Kings Plains, our main management base for four of our reserves on Cape York has been devastated by the flooding following Cyclone Jasper. The flood was over 3m higher than anything seen there for at least 100 years and the waters rose so fast that our managers had to swim for it in the middle of the night and, despite their valiant efforts, the damage is extraordinary. All of our accommodation, 17 rooms, has been flooded and everything needs to be replaced. Our machinery shed and workshop went way under. All of our field gear has been lost. And we very much fear that the bridge on the driveway has gone. We are in shock and devastated by the losses. It is going to be 6-9 months of hard work to make Kings Plains fully operational and the costs will be very large for a relatively small organisation.

YOU ARE ABLE TO HELP PLEASE GO TO OUR DONATIONS PAGE!

We really really appreciate every donation we receive and 100% goes to the field. We have no marketing, public relations, communications or fund raising staff. Rather we have people out in the bush working incredibly hard in very challenging circumstances to try to do the very best we can for our precious wildlife.

Please DONATE if you can.

Welcome to South Endeavour Trust

South Endeavour Trust was established in 2007 as an independent, not for profit, charitable trust with the sole purpose of contributing to nature conservation in Australia.

South Endeavour currently owns and manages 18 conservation reserves. To date we have focused on three areas of great conservation need, each of which has extraordinarily diverse biodiversity values. These are: Northeastern New South Wales; the endangered rainforests of the Atherton Tablelands; and the intersection of the Wet Tropics and Cape York bioregions in Far North Queensland.

At South Endeavour we believe that private individuals and private sector organisations can make a very major contribution to nature conservation in Australia, both supplementing and complementing the public reserve system. We have great admiration for the committed efforts of the national parks services throughout Australia and for organisations such as the Australian Wildlife Conservancy and Bush Heritage as well as for the myriad of smaller organisations and individuals who are doing so much to care for our precious environment.

We believe that there is no single right model for conservation. Rather, there are many right models that, working together, can make a very real difference to protecting the truly unique flora and fauna of this great and ancient continent.

Our primary objectives are three fold:

To make the greatest possible contribution to nature conservation that we can, which often means doing things that others cannot or will not do. For example, we have recently purchased two small areas of very expensive farming land on the Atherton Tablelands for revegetation to complete a essential wildlife corridor that the local community has been working on for many years. This corridor is vital in enabling a range of endemic small mammals the greatest possible chance of survival in the face of the threats of climate change.
To manage our conservation reserves as well as we practically can. This means making good management decisions based on sound science and then carrying those decisions through into on ground actions that make a real difference. Our major management focuses are on: seeking to control and reduce the extent and number of weeds; reducing feral animal populations to as low a level as commercially viable; and to use fire as a tool to ensure appropriate diversity and resilience.
To ensure that we build and maintain a sufficient capital base such the annual income from that capital is sufficient to meet our management costs in perpetuity. This means that we are very focused on knowing and controlling our costs and that we have great regard for future management expenses in considering properties for purchase. As a consequence, we tend to cluster our reserves within specific geographic areas to encourage efficiency in management and that we try to buy properties where the management requirements are known and, preferably, are limited.