Details of this administrative function of the Wildlife Conservation Act 1950 are given in CALM’s Policy Statement No. 33 (CALM 1991), and more recently by Mawson and Majer (1999), with an overview by Horwitz (1999). Under the Act, all indigenous Western Australian animals (defined as any living thing that is not a human being or a plant) are protected unless declared otherwise by the Minister. Three schedules of the Act are used to identify different categories of taxa in need of special protection. Schedule 1 includes species “rare or likely to become extinct” (otherwise known as “threatened species”), Schedule 2 includes species presumed to be extinct and Schedule 4 lists species that, for other reasons, are in need of special protection.[205] Currently various invertebrates are listed under these Schedules, but none are marine.  There are provisions under the Act for taxa to be listed and protected from “taking” under a closed season notice, and 38 invertebrates are currently listed, all non-marine.

Nominations for listing are considered by a threatened species scientific committee that was established in 1997. Criteria such as “adequacy of survey” and “taxonomy” are considered and ranking is according to IUCN criteria. The committee comprises mainly terrestrial ecologists, mostly with mammalian, avian or higher vascular plant expertise, only two (of nine) having any invertebrate expertise. Marine and estuarine expertise is not formally represented, and inland waters, fish, frogs, and almost all invertebrates are not represented (Horwitz 1999). The Act has been under review for six years and will be replaced by a Biodiversity Conservation Bill.

There is currently no legislation covering the conservation of threatened ecological communities. However, an informal, non-statutory process, including advice from a scientific advisory committee, the establishment of the threatened ecological communities database, and steps for assigning ecological communities to categories of threat, is now in place (CALM 1999).