Greenfleet has joined forces with Bush Heritage Australia on an innovative climate-ready revegetation project at Nardoo Hills Reserve in central Victoria.
The project is designed to protect and restore temperate woodlands - the most threatened wooded ecosystem in Australia - and contribute to climate change resilience.
Spanning 1,200 hectares, Nardoo Hills Reserve has experienced dieback of two Eucalypt species – Grey Box (Eucalyptus microcarpa) and Yellow Box (Eucalyptus melliodora). The dieback is affecting both older and younger trees that provide crucial habitat for native wildlife, including the Hooded Robin, Yellow-tufted Honeyeater, Brown Treecreeper and Tree Goanna.
Using data sourced from the Bureau of Meteorology, the project has modelled the regional climate for the next 30 to 70 years. As a result, the seeds to be planted in the trial have been sourced from trees in New South Wales and South Australia that currently experience hotter and drier climates.
The large-scale trial will compare the resilience of the trees from the different provenances as they grow and face a gradually warming and drying climate. It will diversify the Eucalypt species’ gene pool and aim to ‘future-proof’ Nardoo Hills as temperatures increase and rainfall patterns change.
In total, 9,000 native seedlings were planted in 2019 and a further 2,700 in 2020. To learn more about the sourcing of seedlings from different provenances for this project, click here.
While the trial is a joint collaboration between Bush Heritage Australia and Greenfleet, multiple partners are contributing to the project including researchers from the University of Melbourne, CSIRO, University of Adelaide and University of Tasmania, as well as Arborline Nursery and VicRoads.
We hope the results of this research project will help guide further climate-adjusted revegetation works by Greenfleet and Bush Heritage, as well as many other organisations and local landholders.
