Peter DixonPlanning for Ecological Restoration Projects

Peter Dixon- AABR president

Those of us who do on ground bush regeneration, whether doing it as a volunteer (like me!) or as a professional; or work on producing Facilitated Natural Regeneration based restoration plans, strategies, surveys and the like are blessed that we can rely on years of practice and trials and the body of knowledge from practitioners, who have pulled together and freely shared their learnings of what works best in different situations in different ecosystems to trigger the inherent resilience of sites and to restore ecosystem processes.

This body of knowledge of best practice forms the benchmark against which we can determine the standard of methods and activities applied to restoration projects, forming a widely accepted but still relatively informal set of Best Practice Bush Regeneration methods.

Sadly, there are still huge knowledge gaps and a lack of consensus on what constitutes best practice restoration over much of Australia, resulting in lessened outcomes in many restoration projects.

To start the process of “filling the gaps” of bush regeneration knowledge and to work towards determining agreed best practice methods across Australia, and of course communicating these to all, AABR has received a grant from the NSW Environmental Trust to develop a best practice learning platform for restoration, to identify existing best practice, to undertake a gap analysis and to start filling the gaps.  This is called Project ERIK (Environmental Restoration Integrated Knowledge). We are undertaking this as a collaborative project with partners, to date including Greening Australia, NSW TAFE, Local Government NSW, Landcare NSW and the Australian Network for Plant Conservation.

While this stage of the project is centred on NSW (due to the funding source), the basic “infrastructure” of the project will allow AABR to take the platform nationally. We are actively seeking involvement from all interested individuals and organisations who would like to contribute to the project, from joining technical working groups, ecosystem and method specific teams, taking part in surveys and on ground trials and helping with engagement, knowledge sharing and promotion.

If you would like to help out on the project but don’t have the time, AABR is running an EOFY donations campaign , Giving for Guidance, to raise funds to develop guidance material for the project. Keep an eye out on the AABR Socials.

Collectively we have much of knowledge to be able to fill the gaps, define or create accepted best practice methods and to create new benchmarks against which resources can be applied to restoring our ecosystems.

Here are some initial actions you can take to contribute and stay up to date with the project.