Project Description
Grassland Resurrection – Connecting Knowledge, Research & Management Forum
8 May, 2026. Fitzroy Town Hall, Melbourne, Victoria
Presenter: Ben Courtice
Ben Courtice has a degree in botany, with honours in plant ecology. He was a founding member and past convenor of the GPN, and is a member of AABR. He works as a bush regenerator for Southern Ecosystems Management
Is it OK to plant trees in grasslands if they are on escarpments?
Rocky escarpments are one of the most diverse and surprising of the remnant ecosystems on the plains. But what if conservation efforts were to threaten that? A look at how common high-level approaches to “restoration” can damage and homogenise these environments.
Questions from the Forum
Are escarpments less prone to weed invasion because they are harsher environments?
Good question! For some weeds, yes, definitely. On the other hand, some other weeds may prefer escarpments, for example because the harsh environment (and rabbits, roos etc) often leaves areas of bare ground, where weeds like Asphodel and Galenia can become big problems. Or because some weeds need or like the extra warmth of a north-facing escarpment. But because escarpments are so variable, it’s hard to make generalisations. A north-facing escarpment is pretty harsh, but with enough boulders, it may have good sheltered space for plant roots and weeds typically associated with moist environments, like Bridal Creeper Asparagus asparagoides. And south facing escarpments may actually be less, not more harsh than the surrounding environment overall.
For those who may rely on the broad strokes of an EVC plant list to provide to rural landowners when supporting reveg – what could be used instead?
Convenience is the understandable reason why people do this, I guess, because there is often no other ready-made list you can just hand them. Some of the more advanced Landcare groups may have their own local species lists they have developed, which may or may not be fit for your purpose. For example, the Friends group that I am president of has a spreadsheet listing the common dominant/foundational species for each of a series of zones from the riparian bench to the upper bank to escarpments, in the specific area we work in. But this kind of resource doesn’t always exist for your area.
If you don’t have an obviously similar reference site to develop a list from, the first step is to see what native plants grow in the surrounding area. Drive around, use ALA, etc. Hopefully you know those species a bit already, ie what situations they are likely to grow in and at what density. You also should know the soil, aspect, existing veg etc at the site where they are to be planted. Then you can probably work out which species are the best to use, and roughly how many. If you’re not sure about a species, you may want to recommend just a few to see how they go, especially the big dominant species like Eucalypts.
That’s a bit of research to do, but if you are serious about being a bush regenerator and working in that area, you should probably do that research, for at least the common species and types of sites you come across. Then you can use and refine the information for years to come.
This is also dealt with in more detail under another question below (“What tools do you recommend instead of EVC benchmarks?”).
What is required to get EVC species lists more accurate?
Personally, I am not a fan of EVCs as a concept or tool, I think they are best left to offsetters. For offset purposes, properly trained Vegetation Quality Assessors should be able to see where a species not listed in the EVC Benchmark is nonetheless an important part of the site, and make allowances. But in practice I wonder how often the Assessor fails to do this.
I think that the reference sites, and plant communities that were used to compile EVC Benchmarks should be made explicit and made available, so that there is something to start with that is better than the misleadingly simple and convenient EVC Benchmark handout to guide restoration. But this still does not deal with the problem of recognising local ecosystems that are not adequately described by any category in the simplified schema of EVCs. It also needs to be made more clear that modeled EVC Benchmarks, as they are now, are not designed for restoration planning, and I think they never will be.
The other (important) consideration is the EVC mapping is often inaccurate, either just plain wrong for the site (hopefully not too often) or just too coarse to be useful at smaller scale.
Do we know if other countries use fire as well to look after grassland ? If yes , with what results ?
Yes, it is an important component of grassland ecosystems in many places. Certainly in the USA a lot of their grasslands are actively managed with fire. Broadly, from what I’ve seen, the methods and results are similar to what they are in Australian grasslands. Not all grasslands, here or in other countries, necessarily need or benefit from fire, but many clearly do. A great blog where I’ve been reading about fire and grassland management in the USA is at https://grasslandrestorationnetwork.org/.
Does burning of the newly established grassland sites occur (or is it planned) and, if so, how is it managed given they generally occur in highly urbanised areas?
It’s important to be careful with burning sites where you may have lots of recently planted or germinated seedlings, as a fire too early in their establishment may kill them. However, I’ve used fire very successfully (in combination with sugar application and weed spraying) to help revive grassland plants and control weeds in areas recently moved from regular mowing to grassland management.
How do you know what native species to reintroduce to small variant ecosystems on escarpments?
If you can find a similar niche on another site that is in good condition, you may have an easy answer by just copying it. However, there may be no such easy solution. Understanding what plants grow on escarpments in your area and what conditions they thrive in will help you choose if any of them will work.
Sometimes you might come across a very different niche that needs a more radical approach. For example, what would you do with a degraded brackish spring on an escarpment? My approach to that is based on a minor bit of experience with brackish spring communities (but not on an escarpment in this case).
If you can find records of species that just might grow in that kind of environment in the surrounding area, you could try some of them and see if they work. Or go further afield – many wetland plants (in this case) are moved around by wetland birds. You could try some species that are more coastal. They may fail – or they may be too successful and you may decide you have a new weed, and pull them all out and start again! In the one brackish spring environment that I’ve been trying to restore, I’ve done all those things (and I did eventually find a reference site, things got easier after that).
Other escarpment niches besides brackish springs might require different approaches, but I think there is a need for cautious creativity.
How can you selectively control couch grass in a wallaby microleana grassland?
(this is the same answer I gave a similar question below)
I hate couchgrass. Depending on the scale of the infestation, it may be possible to control it by dabbing with glyphosate. Larger problem areas may need careful spot spraying. The key is to get it while the couchgrass is happy and growing – warm weather after decent rain, typically. Then you can kill most of it with a very weak mix of glyphosate – probably about 2mL/L. This will still kill a lot of wallaby grass if you’re not careful about your spraying, though, and possibly the Microlaena too. If you can burn the site first, it becomes a lot easier to separate out the bad species’ regrowth from the good, and make sure you only spray the targets. Triclopyr and some other group 4 herbicides are said to affect C4 grasses like Couch, but I don’t know how lethal they are and haven’t tried them.
What tools do you recommend instead of EVC benchmarks?
I recommend practitioners start by reading the Society for Ecological Restoration Australasia’s National Standards for Ecological Restoration. These are fairly high level but give some pointers towards a scientifically defensible approach. (https://www.seraustralasia.com/pages/standards.html)
In general, the use of reference sites, or pseudo-reference sites compiled from plant records from the surrounding area if there is no direct reference site, is my preferred approach. Once you have that starting point, a little (sometimes a lot) of trial and error is probably inevitable. If you have some idea of where and how a plant likes to grow, and know it is present in the surrounding region, you should have a good idea if it is suitable. A spreadsheet of local-region species and notes on their preferred habitat is a great tool.
In order to compile your own lists, the Atlas of Living Australia (https://bie.ala.org.au/) is good if you become familiar with its various functions – mapping the distribution of species in space but also in time, as you can screen out (for example) recent records that might be from reveg plantings not the original distribution. You can, for example, generate lists of all species that have been found within a surrounding area. Vic Flora online (https://vicflora.rbg.vic.gov.au/) has useful maps combining the Victorian Biodiversity Atlas and the Australian Virtual Herbarium (each of which you can also look up separately for their distribution maps). Vic Flora also gives useful, albeit brief, notes about the preferred habitat of species. There are a number of guidebooks that also give good notes about the habitat niche preferences, growth habit, propagation methods etc of individual species, such as the excellent Flora of Melbourne.
What are the alternatives to looking at the naturekit EVCs? Is it just local knowledge we need to seek out?
I have mostly answered this in several other questions already I think. Ecosystems are idiosyncratic and locally specific, so I think generalisations across large regions are often unhelpful. Local knowledge is always good. It doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to look at the EVC Benchmarks but bear in mind they are possibly not a good descriptor of any site in the real world, just a notional “average” of many ecosystems. Since ecosystems are not numbers, an “average” ecosystem is dubious.
What is the best way to control couch grass in an environment with native grasses such as wallaby grass?
(this is the same answer I gave a similar question above)
I hate couchgrass. Depending on the scale of the infestation, it may be possible to control it by dabbing with glyphosate. Larger problem areas may need careful spot spraying. The key is to get it while the couchgrass is happy and growing – warm weather after decent rain, typically. Then you can kill most of it with a very weak mix of glyphosate – probably about 2mL/L. This will still kill a lot of wallaby grass if you’re not careful about your spraying, though, and possibly the Microlaena too. If you can burn the site first, it becomes a lot easier to separate out the bad species’ regrowth from the good, and make sure you only spray the targets. Triclopyr and some other group 4 herbicides are said to affect C4 grasses like Couch, but I don’t know how lethal they are and haven’t tried them.
Is the purpose of restoration to get structure and composition right from the get-go, or is it to facilitate succession and allow natural processes to figure it out through trial and error?
This is a very good question to consider. I can imagine it could be either, and there are probably multiple valid pathways to restore a single site, even for the same restoration goals. In the ideal world we could just control the weeds and wait for nature to do the rest. But that might take forever – species that are lost from the site may not have the means to readily recolonise (especially in landscapes fragmented by human land uses). So some replanting/reintroductions might be necessary. One of the reasons for a denser planting across large areas of the site is if it’s going to help you to control the weeds, and perhaps reduce costs in the long run. An argument for just introducing a few patches and letting them do their thing is that they will probably be more successful in the long run and find more natural locations to grow. In both cases, you need to think about what other good species are present and how it will affect them. Will a dense planting shade out remnant forbs? Will small restoration shrub/tree patches provide enough habitat and connectivity for animal species that use and need them? Etc
Offsets, are generally crap and underwhelming…. How do you mitigate the shittiness of offsets ?
What an important question to consider. Some specific offsets are so odious you should probably refuse to have anything to do with them. But as offsets are the main method for regulating habitat destruction at present, it’s pretty much inevitable to be involved with them at some point. I would be concerned that people like consultants working with developers (etc) to set up offsets all the time may become desensitised to the nature and scale of the problem, even with the best of intentions, and no longer care. This is probably how we get some of the mercenary consultants that give the profession a bad name. That’s a real psychological trap of working in and for a destructive system, but it’s not an inevitable outcome. We certainly need good people working to ensure that when offsetting is done it’s done to a high and honest standard, at least until we can get a better system in place.
One of the ways I rationalise all my work in this destructive system is that the environment is getting destroyed, more species are being added to endangered lists, climate change is accelerating catastrophically, and here we are plugging away at our day jobs on a very token drip feed of environmental restoration funding fixing relatively small problems. Clearly our day job isn’t going to fix the big problems, no matter how well we do it, or we would be seeing some progress by now. That may sound very pessimistic, but it’s also (in some ways) liberating. Fixing the big problems isn’t the purpose or responsibility of our day job. What we can do in our day job is be professional and dedicated so the limited amount of funding given to environmental restoration, even through shitty offsets, at least achieves something. We can feel good about that.
In the bigger picture, and outside of the scope of bush regeneration work, I encourage all people to join, become active in, and financially support the organisations that are actually fighting for better laws and funding to protect nature, stop climate change, etc. Whether that is supporting the Grassy Plains Network, AABR, and similar groups, or trying to get new and better MPs and political parties into government, or standing in front of developers’ bulldozers is a matter of what you feel you can personally contribute best to. I try to do several of these kinds of things in my spare time!
