Reviewing 30 years of restoration - has it worked?
NRM NEWS - AUGUST 2020 - TERRESTRIAL ECOSYSTEMS
By Elisa Tack
Senior Land Services Officer - Monitoring, Evaluation, Reporting & Improvement
How do you know you're making a difference?
We all get satisfaction from seeing seedlings we planted grow into tall trees and shrubs. Or from watching birds come back to a patch of bush after it is has been fenced out and planted with understory.
But we often wonder:
How do we know that all the efforts of landholders, community members, Landcare groups and the government is making a difference on a bigger scale?
Recently Murray Local Land Services and some of our Landcare partners worked on a project to try and answer this question for the south west slopes area, where a huge amount of native vegetation restoration work has been completed over the last three decades.
Data was collected from works on 2,746 sites completed over 24 years, between 1990 and 2014. This included mapping areas from past projects by West Hume Landcare, Holbrook Landcare and Murray Catchment Management Authority. Satellite data was then used to look at how vegetation has changed in that whole time, on sites where works were done and over the region as a whole.
The results of the study are exciting as it shows that restoration works have been very successful, with almost 90% of sites showing an increase in vegetation cover in that time. In some areas, vegetation cover has increased by more than 30%, and much of this is due to active vegetation projects. Another finding was that during the Millennium Drought from 2000 to 2010 revegetation sites maintained cover better than other sites in the surrounding landscape.
Studies like this help show that the collective effort of community groups, landholders and government agencies over decades does make a difference. Every project completed and all the funding and time committed by governments, businesses and individuals delivers a piece in the jigsaw puzzle of ensuring our landscapes are healthy and productive into the future.
For more information on the study and its findings look at the project factsheet
