The Lone Sentinel highlights the environmental change on the broad-acre farming landscape in the south eastern wheatbelt. Sentinel trees and Paddock trees are the single and small stands of trees left in the paddocks from the initial clearing of the landscape for agriculture. These trees are some of the oldest left in the landscape and they are disappearing fast.

Paddock trees are rapidly declining due to incompatible farming practices such as cultivation of root zones, spray drift, fertiliser application, and stock grazing, this along with dieback, lack of regeneration, natural ageing and climate change are all stressing these trees. The biggest loss of Sentinels is the recent second wave of land clearing practices, to accommodate wide-span GPS and auto steer controlled machinery. This has decimated the lone paddock trees with many being taken out to enable long runs of straight sowing of grain crops. This is a government sanctioned clearing exemption providing no more than 5Ha is cleared per year.

It is estimated that these paddock trees will all be gone within 50–100 years.