The retention and restoration of indigenous flora and fauna:
- Creates a habitat for indigenous plants and animals
- Has enormous educational value
- Helps prevent weed invasions
- Helps preserve the diversity of local genetic varieties of plants and animals
- Minimises watering and mowing costs
What you can do
Retain existing remnant native habitat, from single trees to urban bushland remnants to national parks. It's much cheaper and easier not to destroy it in the first place than to try to recreate it later, so do what you can to support the protection of remnant vegetation. In your own patch, make yourself familiar with both the weedy and indigenous species that belong/don't belong there. Prioritise the weed species according to their ecological impact and remove the highest priority weeds, using minimum disturbance techniques, in a pattern working from the higher quality patches, outwards.
Restore remnant habitat so that weed invasion, rubbish dumping, neglect or careless 'tidying up' don't degrade the habitat values any more. Help control environmental weeds, those exotic or non-local native plants which can take over in natural vegetation. Here the principle of "If you get rid of the weeds, the bush comes back" applies. Never underestimate the huge dormant seed bank in the ground that will germinate when the exotic competition is removed.
Don't be to hasty or bite off more than you can properly manage over the medium term.
Even weeds tends to be habitat for something, if they've been on the site for a long time. Stage weed removal over a long period to allow regeneration to gradually replace the habitat value of the weedy species. Follow up, follow up, follow up....
Consider reintroducing logs to provide invertebrate and lizard habitat.
It took 150 years to get like this, don't presume to be able to "fix it up" in a few short years. Weed seeds can stay in the soil for many years, just like indigenous seeds.
Don't spray herbicide! Herbicide sprays create more issues in native bushland than they solve. Avoid using them! Glyphosate, for instance, degrades into a phosphate, which exotic weeds love and the low-phosphate evolved Australian species detest. This product actually encourages weed germination and growth and has the opposite effect on the locals. It's also implicated in toxic affects in the microscopic soil fungi that most Australian plants rely on to survive. Some specific herbicides may be indicated for certain weeds for various reasons, but it must be understood that from an ecological restoration point of view, they are the last resort
Only Revegetate areas where there is almost no remnant vegetation (even then there will be soil stored seeds) using only indigenous plants grown from locally collected seed or cuttings. These can be purchased from nurseries specializing in growing local plants, or you can grow them yourself if you stick to some basic rules.
Better still, a cheaper and wiser way is to just to weed out areas and broadcast locally collected indigenous plant seed and control the weeds in a follow up program. Planting tubes is an expensive and far less effective way to revegetate a site.
Spraying, mulching and planting tubes creates only low biodiversity garden beds, not natural ecosystems. Mulching doesn't just suppress weed seeds. The mere act of mulching can introduce pathogens from elsewhere and will add nutrients to the soil as it breaks down. Excess nutrients are the enemy of indigenous species and mulch can change the soil chemistry. One of the challenges in restoring a degraded site is the nutrification of the soil caused by the previous land use
The most important things are to have the work expertly prioritised and to plan works (and results) over a decade or two rather than a year or two. Let the natural regeneration set the pace of the work
Go to our 3Rs page to read or download the Basic Principles of Vegetation Management and other papers that will help you in your planning
Thanks to Tony Faithfull and IFFA
Liberation Ecology - the basic principles of habitat rehabilitation
Before any work commences, assess, plan, prioritise. Restoration plans should realistically operate over decades rather than years. It took 150 years to degrade it
Liberate the best bits first. Work from the highest quality, most diverse areas and move outwards from there
Work slowly and systematically, liberating areas in order of their vegetation quality values and weed prioritisation and timing needs
Follow the Golden Rule - if you aren't 100% sure it's a weed, don't pull it out. Many well known weeds have lesser known indigenous look-alikes, some of them rare species. Seek definitive expert identification
Adopt minimal disturbance weeding methodologies - soil disturbance inevitably leads to more weed invasion
Annual grasses (all annual grasses are weeds, except one, not found in our particular area) can be eliminated by mowing before just seed set or by simply pulling the seed heads off. The same applies to most annual and biannual weeds
Resist the urge to plant first and ask questions later. If you remove the threatening processes, i.e. weeds, animals, people etc, remnant bushland will usually come back by itself. Many indigenous species have seeds that persist in the soil for decades. Waiting and seeing is a valid and valuable management approach. Patience, Grasshopper....
Consider direct seeding first, before buying plants. If areas of the site are assessed as needing certain species enriched or reintroduced, always consider direct seeding first, using seed from the site or very nearby. Sometimes germination may take some years. Again, patience and the long term view should prevail
Minimal chemical usage – for a number of reasons including inevitable off-target damage, ground story and cryptogamic layer biodiversity loss, soil nutrification (glyphosate), bio accumulation, OH&S issues, costs involved etc.
Minimal use of mulch – although mulching can be very useful in a revegetation and a garden bed situation, when restoring remnants its use is usually unnecessary and can actually result in a net loss of biodiversity! It can nutrify the soil and brings with it the risk of introducing weed seeds, foreign fungi and suppressing regeneration of the usually prodigious indigenous seed banks, particularly the small herbs, forbs, mosses and annuals that you can’t buy in tubes…. Natural litter layers are not measured in inches of depth, more often as a percentage cover of the visible soil layer
Take ‘before and after’ photos from marked photopoints, at the same time of the year, for long term monitoring purposes. It's easy to forget (and hard to describe) what the site used to look like
Be mindful of buffers, e.g. even some woody weeds can be left standing to provide buffers to prevent adjacent grassy weed invasion (kikuyu etc)
Be mindful of habitat, e.g. check for birds’ nests, possum dreys and other signs of fauna usage. In some cases leave weeds that provide habitat until replacement indigenous species are established or at least carry out a staged removal over time
Leave wood on the site. Both dead trees and ground wood are carbon and habitat. Resist the "clean up the bush" urge
Dead and fallen wood is essential habitat for fungi, invertebrates and reptiles. If ground wood has been removed or is scarce consider bringing some in. For wildfire safety considerations, "elevated fuel" is the main danger and is considered to be anything under the thickness of a man's thumb. Logs on the ground do not constitute "fuel"
When concentrating on a particular weed species, remove mature, seeding individuals first
When concentrating on a dioecious (separate male and female plants) weed, identify and remove females or fruiting individuals first e.g. Pittosporum undulatum
Observe hygiene procedures e.g. clean shoes, clean tools and bagging of weed seeds, or other means of removal from the site
Timing is an important consideration. Hand weed control may best be undertaken when species are flowering, prior to seed set. When using herbicides, best practice is to apply the treatment (e.g. frill and fill) when the plant is in it's growth stage, allowing maximum translocation of the herbicide through the vascular system of the plant. In sites where orchids or other geophytes and annuals are present, undertake works in these areas to coincide with the time that these species are dormant, or post seeding
Highly sensitive areas, such as orchid sites, require highly sensitive weed management. This is due to the fact that orchids rely of intact surface layers, often composed predominantly of mosses and small annual herbs
Gidja Walker & Philip Jensen
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