Woogaroo Forest is a 450 hectare remnant of native bushland on the edge of Springfield; one of the last substantial areas of intact habitat left in a rapidly developing pocket of South East Queensland.

Step inside and the forest tells its own age. Centuries-old ironbarks still stand throughout Woogaroo, their wood too dense and their trunks too gnarled to have ever been worth a logger's saw - living relics of what this whole region once looked like, before the Springfield suburbs spread out around them. Threaded through the gullies are pockets of Lowland Rainforest of Subtropical Australia, a Critically Endangered ecological community, home to threatened plants like the Scaly Myrtle. And rising across the site is the Woogaroo Vine Scrub - one of only four such vine scrub remnants left anywhere in Ipswich; a habitat type now reduced to a sliver of what it once was across the region.

This is a functioning ecosystem, not a collection of trees: mature canopy, habitat connectivity, and the complex, interlocking systems that endangered koalas, vulnerable grey-headed flying-foxes, gliders, platypus and a wealth of other native wildlife depend on to survive.

The forest's significance extends beyond its permanent residents. Its flowering eucalypts and intact canopy make it potential fallback habitat for highly mobile, nomadic species like the critically endangered Swift Parrot and Regent Honeyeater - birds that range across thousands of kilometres of the eastern seaboard, following unpredictable flowering events from season to season, and rely on patches of habitat like Woogaroo remaining intact and available wherever their search for nectar takes them.

What makes Woogaroo Forest important is not only what it contains, but what it still is; an intact landscape continuing to support wildlife in real time, in a region where so much of that habitat has already been lost or fragmented.

Its future now sits in the hands of government decision-makers. The outcome will determine whether this landscape is retained, or permanently cleared.