How Nationals Students Are Helping Protect WA’s Threatened Wildlife With Forever Wild 

95% of student-athletes registered for UniSport Nationals Perth 2026 have chosen to make their Nationals experience count for more, helping fund conservation projects that protect Western Australia’s wildlife and natural landscapes. 

Through UniSport Australia’s partnership with everclime, students can opt in to a voluntary $2.50 donation during registration, with funds raised supporting three WA-based conservation projects chosen by student leaders: the Rottnest Foundation, WA Wildlife and Forever Wild. All funds raised through the Environmental Legacy Project will be matched dollar-for-dollar by UniSport, turning thousands of small choices by students into a greater investment in conservation. 

Forever Wild is one of the three projects selected for the initiative, with its large-scale conservation work helping protect some of Western Australia’s most significant landscapes and threatened wildlife. 

Founded in Perth and a registered charity, Forever Wild is focused on unlocking private and philanthropic capital to support large-scale nature and biodiversity protection, with a strong focus on equity for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. The organisation works at a landscape scale, managing large areas of land and delivering long-term conservation and biodiversity programs rather than focusing on individual sites. 

In Western Australia, Forever Wild owns and manages more than 600,000 hectares across four stations in the state’s western deserts: Narndee, Boodanoo, Meeline and Challa, forming one of Australia’s largest privately managed conservation landscapes. This supports conservation programs focused on protecting threatened species and understanding the ecosystems they depend on, including the Narndee Malleefowl Project. 

Malleefowl are large ground-dwelling birds known for their unusual breeding behaviour, constructing large mounds from soil, sand and vegetation to incubate their eggs. Once widespread across southern Australia, their numbers have declined significantly over the past century, and the species has disappeared from much of its former range. Malleefowl are now considered threatened with extinction. 

When the Narndee Malleefowl Project began, there were no records or data confirming whether Malleefowl were still present within the Narndee landscape or the surrounding region. Monitoring has since provided an encouraging picture, revealing active breeding and widespread signs of Malleefowl across Narndee. The findings indicate the landscape may support one of the more nationally significant remaining Malleefowl populations in Australia. 

The discovery presents an important opportunity to strengthen conservation and recovery efforts for the species, but significant threats remain. Feral cats and foxes pose a risk through predation, while habitat loss, climate change, mining and other industrial activity can also place pressure on Malleefowl and the environments they rely on. 

The project is helping build the evidence needed to better understand these pressures and guide future management. The information gathered at Narndee could also contribute to conservation planning across the wider western deserts region, extending the potential impact of the project beyond the landscape itself. 

For students travelling to Perth for Nationals, their support is helping contribute to the protection of a remote and little-known corner of WA’s western deserts, while the data gathered here could help shape Malleefowl conservation across the wider region for years to come. Collectively, their choices are helping university sport play a role in protecting threatened wildlife and the landscapes they depend on. 

For more information on Forever Wild, visit | https://foreverwild.com.au/ 

About the UniSport Australia x everclime Environmental Legacy Project  

Through a partnership with everclime, UniSport Australia is connecting the university sport community with environmental projects that deliver meaningful conservation outcomes across Western Australia.   

Through everclime’s impact platform, every contribution is tracked, providing students with transparency on the projects their support helps fund and the outcomes it contributes towards.   

By coming together through university sport, student-athletes can turn their collective support into meaningful environmental impact that extends well beyond the competition.