Vote #1: Brush-tailed Phascogale
Brush-tailed Phascogales are nocturnal and rarely seen. However, numbers are declining and threats such as habitat loss, fragmentation and feral predators, are putting it at risk.
This year, at Eurardy Reserve on Nanda Country in mid-north Western Australia, we led an innovative project to restore the iconic understorey of annual wildflowers.
Named ‘Re-wilding the midwest: Bringing wildflowers back to country’, the
project is supported by funding from the Western Australian Government’s State Natural Resource Management Program.
Since 2019, the team have worked in partnership with Carbon Positive Australia to help to restore land that was previously cleared for agriculture at Eurardy. In
this new project, we are trying to restore groundcover species on the reserve, with the long-term goal of growing island patches of wildflowers across the
whole restoration area.
As we face climate change projections of drier, hotter seasons and greater seasonal variability, it is more important than ever to understand wildflower
germination cues and restore land, so it can retain its high biodiverse value.
Mid-west Western Australia had an extremely dry winter in 2023, so the team’s wildflowers did not bloom. But science is about testing, learning, adapting and patience!
– Fiamma Riviera., Ecologist“It’s not a quick fix. It takes time; it takes years. Not everything’s going to be perfect."
"We’re going to have some successes, but we'll also have some failures.
We’re going to have to learn from those and adapt.”
There is hope for 2024, as the seeds patiently wait for the right conditions to transform into a magnificent coloured carpet.
This project was supported by funding from the Western Australian Government’s State NRM Program.
