Ecosystem restoration focus of $500,000 Volkswagen donation

The sound of constant hammering is not what most people would call beautiful, but it’s a sound that brings joy to Phil Palmer, Reserve Manager of Scottsdale Reserve on Ngunnawal Country, NSW. A weekend of tree planting at Scottsdale Reserve restores the land and soul.

Our plan to increase resilience in the face of climate change is kickstarted with our three newest reserves.

Ngulambarra, which means meeting place in the Dja Dja Wurrung language, provides connectivity between another Bush Heritage's Lawan reserve, and Ngarri (Mt Egbert), which is part of the Wychitella Nature Conservation Reserve.

How the Black Summer bushfires kick-started a restoration revolution at Scottsdale conservation reserve in NSW.

Scientific research into ecological restoration has traditionally focused on plants and animals. But what about what’s in the soil?

The funding will be directed to our on-ground conservation work in three states.

Bush Heritage’s efforts to connect remnant patches of bush in the fragmented but ecologically diverse landscape between the Stirling Range and Fitzgerald River national parks have been given a boost with support from Loro Parque Fundación.

Back in the 1970s, the skies over Perth used to blacken with the sight of Carnaby’s Cockatoos. The big noisy parrots flocked across the horizon in their thousands. These days they are few and far between.

The bush regeneration gods have smiled on Scottsdale Reserve this week, right in time for our new grassland seeding project. After many months without rain, to our complete and total joy, it started raining on the Monday afternoon before seeds were sown! By 6pm Monday it was snowing and it continued to interchange between snow and rain all night.

Rather than lose hope when eucalypts started dying in central Victoria, Bush Heritage scientists came up with an innovative solution using future climate scenarios.

As Bush Heritage ecologist Ben Parkhurst, his wife Tina Schroeder and their 10-month-old son Liam look on, the first of over 36,000 native seedlings are planted in the loamy, moist soil as part of the first phase of an ambitious project that will eventually see over 1350 hectares of cleared land on Eurardy restored.

Carnaby's Cockatoos are returning to restored farmland in Western Australia to feed just 5 years after planting.

We are working on an innovative climate-ready revegetation project with Greenfleet at one of our flagship Victorian reserves.

Completely unaware of being watched, a pair of Malleefowl have been practising courtship displays on their new mound. We're very excited that they've made their home in 6-year-old revegetation on our Monjebup North property in south-west Western Australia.

A new state-of-the-art nursery at Scottsdale Reserve will generate up to 10,000 native plants a year with almost no environmental footprint, thanks to solar technology, wetland filtration and a waste water recycling system.

Bush Heritage’s revegetation of 420 hectares on Monjebup North Reserve has seen the return of the poorly studied Western Brush Wallaby, known locally as the Black-gloved Wallaby or Kwoora.

A wide variety of birds are returning to our Monjebup North property, in the Gondwana Link pathway in southwest WA, just 4 years after the paddocks were seeded with native plants.

When my husband, Ben, and I decided to make the move to Eurardy Reserve in WA I was in the middle of searching for a research topic so I could start a PhD. I've landed on a project investigating the recovery of York Gum Woodlands in the mid-west.

Last week Angela Sanders led the annual south-west fauna surveys on Bush Heritage's partner property -Yarraweyah Falls. Owners Bill and Jane Thompson were thrilled when the team caught a female Honey Possum with pouch young in the revegetation site - a first for this area.

Bird surveys of restored farmland are always full of surprises and this year was no exception. As a Gondwana Link Ecologist, I've been doing bird surveys at Monjebup, Chingarrup, Beringa and Yarraweyah Falls over the past two weeks.

Eurardy Reserve is a special place, with some 700 plant species on the reserve, including a number of threatened, priority-listed and locally endemic species. However there are also cleared patches, a legacy of Eurardy's agricultural history, that have seen little to no natural regeneration for decades. This week we took the first steps towards restoring those patches back to the biodiverse areas they once were.

Restoration on our Monjebup property in Gondwana Link, southwest Western Australia, has received a boost with donor support to establish food plants for the threatened Carnaby's Black Cockatoo. Eva Palmer is supporting a 3-year project to put more proteaceous plants back into the landscape for these birds. The initial phase was a trial of direct sowing by machine of proteaceous seed, which in the past has proved to be a big challenge because of the difficulty in collecting, treating and distributing the large seeds.

With huge financial and other support from South Coast NRM, and bolstered by generous contributions from private donors, we've now all but completed 400 hectares - that's 1,000 acres - of restoration on the Monjebup North property we bought in 2009.

Ecologist Angela Sanders has been working on our Gondwana Link properties in the Fitz-Stirling region of Western Australia for 10 years. Monjebup Reserve is exceptionally rich in plant species and, in a twist of logic, poor soil (that is, low in nutrients, especially nitrogen and phosphorous) is one of the reasons.

At Nardoo Hills Reserve in central Victoria climate change is causing extensive dieback of Grey Box and Yellow Box trees. This project will provide long-term guidance on viable, climate-ready eucalypt revegetation options.