Forests are essential for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees. But according to a recent assessment, the world is not on track to meet its goal of halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030.

Australia has a poor track record when it comes to forest clearing. Our rate of clearing is one of the fastest in the developed world. We also have one of the highest rates of animal extinctions from habitat loss.

To draw down carbon dioxide and improve biodiversity, we need to plant a lot more trees. But tree planting takes a lot of time and money, particularly in tropical areas where reforesting rainforests require a high diversity and density of tree species.

A much more cost-effective strategy is to protect existing forests, and a key opportunity in Queensland is to fast-track strategic parcels of high value regrowth vegetation (HVR) from regrowth to remnant forest.

High value regrowth vegetation is defined by the Vegetation Management Act 1999 (VMA) as regrowth, that is more than 15 years old, on freehold, Indigenous or similar land. High value regrowth vegetation is more vulnerable to clearing and degradation than remnant vegetation because there is less awareness or knowledge of its importance and value. It is therefore less likely to progress to remnant status – a status that would give it greater protection in law.

In the Wet Tropics, there are 1,758 high value regrowth areas in prime landscape locations – adjacent to protected areas or within statewide biodiversity corridors. They are mostly on smaller properties of 5-10 hectares.

For the past 4-5 years, Terrain NRM has been running a Building Rainforest Resilience program, which incentivised landholders in priority locations to restore and protect rainforest on their properties. It resulted in 738 hectares of habitat protection, more than 30 hectares of revegetation and nearly 250 hectares of weed management.

An additional benefit of this project was the connections made between landholders and Traditional Owners, which in some cases has led to business opportunities for First Nations people as well as opportunities to access Country. Building these relationships helps to create sustained maintenance beyond the life of the project.

This is a project that can easily be scaled up with more investment.

There are about 1000 small landholders in prime locations in the Wet Tropics who have high value regrowth vegetation on their properties. Greater investment would enable us to work with these landholders through incentives to protect and improve vegetation condition, especially in habitat that is endangered or ‘of concern’.

Mossman Botanic Garden is now a reality. Today, more than 200 people combined to plant over 4000 trees, marking a significant milestone in the transformation of former sugarcane land into a public botanical garden.

The event, hosted by MBG and Wet Tropics Restoration Alliance members Terrain NRM and Rainforest Rescue, is helping to turn designs and blueprints into a recreational, research and training facility, and a gateway to the Daintree rainforest.

Mossman Botanic Garden CEO, Nicky Swan, said she was delighted by the collaborative effort.

“The Mossman Botanic Garden project is a community project, aimed at showcasing the unique biodiversity of the Wet Tropics region and sharing the ecological knowledge of our Traditional Owners,’’ she said.

“This initiative is also about creating green jobs and stimulating the local economy. The community and partner organisations – we’re all in this together to bring a long-held vision to life.”

Stewart Christie, CEO of Terrain NRM, said the tree planting event was a great way to mark the natural resource management organisation’s 20th anniversary.

“For two decades, Terrain NRM has worked with hundreds of partners across the Wet Tropics region and has channelled over $200 million into environmental initiatives to protect and restore the land, waterways, threatened species and the Great Barrier Reef,” he said.

“The next 20 years are going to be very challenging with climate change and biodiversity loss, so we wanted to mark this occasion by contributing to a community project that will leave a legacy.”

Rainforest Rescue is managing the planting and ongoing maintenance, and providing the trees for the new venture from its recently established large-scale native plant nursery in the Daintree. CEO Branden Barber said the Mossman Botanic Garden project was helping to share the message of rainforest conservation and climate action.

“This tree planting event is our largest to date and an opportunity to demonstrate our capacity to support restoration projects at scale within the region. Now there are over 70 species of rainforest plants beginning to form a new rainforest – all collected from our Daintree protected properties and propagated and grown at our Cow Bay Nursery. We’re drawing carbon from the atmosphere and increasing biodiverse habitat. Supporting the new Mossman Botanic Garden and working alongside Terrain NRM to create great conservation outcomes together is inspiring. Plant a rainforest!”

What a difference 18 months can make – that’s the feeling at Tash and John MacPherson’s cattle property where a swag of changes is rejuvenating the land and waterways.

The family is working with natural resource management organisation Terrain NRM on a property overhaul that includes earthworks, fencing, tree-planting, alternative water sources for cattle and a fresh perspective on grazing the land.

Tash Macpherson said the results were a win for cattle pastures and the overall environment.

“When we bought this property in mid-2020 we de-stocked it for a year,’’ she said. “The land really needed a break. There was bad erosion – big wash-outs along the waterways where the cattle had been, and springs that were a boggy mess.”

Through the project, three creeks have been fenced-off, smaller grazing paddocks have been created, 5000 native trees have been planted to strengthen creekbanks, and an off-stream watering system has been installed with a bore, water tanks and troughs.

Zuni bowl, fencing, tree-planting, off-stream watering solutions…

A Zuni bowl was also constructed to stop erosion advancing in one of the paddocks.

Terrain NRM’s Vanessa Drysdale said the bowl was a carefully designed lining of rocks at a steep drop in the gully erosion.

“This was an active gully system that had eroded several hundred metres in wet seasons over the last few years, and wasn’t going to slow down without intervention,’’ she said. “The traditional solution is a rock chute, but Zuni bowls are a more cost-effective treatment method that has proved its worth on Tableland and Daintree farms over the last few years.”

Saving sediment from reaching the reef

She said the combined work on the MacPherson property would save an estimated 180 tonnes of sediment from flowing to the Great Barrier Reef each year. It’s one of 11 properties where earthworks, tree-planting, fencing and off-stream watering infrastructure strategies have provided long-term solutions to erosion issues.

There’s a lot more to rainforest revegetation work than digging holes and planting trees. When Hugh Spencer and his wife Brigitta bought a cleared block of land in the Daintree 33 years ago and decided to re-create a forest, they were embarking on a project that has become a reforestation model for the region. The tallest trees are now over 20m high and the new forest covers six hectares.

Here are some of their learnings, as landholders and as founders of the Cape Tribulation Research Station and Australian Tropical Research Foundation.

Hugh says:

Work the way nature would work:

It’s important to use local plants which have evolved in your area. Be flexible – nature doesn’t plan the composition of forests. It is dependent on available seeds and the vagaries of the seed dispersers.

Use local seedlings:

We collect seedlings alongside roads or on the boundaries of forests. (Nature has done the hard work of germinating them but nature is profligate, and many won’t survive there because they’ll be shaded out and outcompeted, or they’re just in the wrong place.) We pot them, look after them with shade and water, and let them develop. After six months we start the hardening process and we plant them in the ground once the heavy rains start.

Use local soil:

We discovered early on that nursery mix didn’t work here. The plants were drying out incredibly fast as we didn’t have the luxury of spray irrigation. We plant our seedlings about 1.5m apart. It takes a little longer to get a closed canopy but …

Weed control:

Highly invasive weeds have the potential to prevent re-forestation of damaged land. Weeds were the biggest issue for the first 10 or so years. We were up against introduced species including guinea grass, Brachiaria, navua sedge and sicklepod. We stomped (to flatten) and sprayed grasses,
with glyphosate and they became thick mulch beds. This greatly reduces weeding and conserves soil moisture. We also used metsulfuron-methyl (MSM), a selective broadleaf herbicide and discovered it was the best answer to much of our weed control issues.

In trials, volunteers at the station assessed the impact of MSM weed spraying on seedlings of the native flora and found that 85 per cent of the native rainforest species (78 species were tested) exposed to metsulfuron-methyl were unaffected or, after a minor setback, recovered. Most of the 15 per cent of species affected were pioneer species.

18 October 2021

A new $250,000 grants round is opening for threatened species recovery team members and landholders with priority areas of rainforest in the Wet Tropics region.

Terrain NRM is contacting landholders who have properties with large areas of cassowary habitat or coastal rainforest, or even small patches of critically-endangered Mabi forest.

Grants for tree-planting, weed removal, nature refuges

The grants are for tree-planting, weed removal and nature refuge projects. They are part of Terrain NRM’s Building Rainforest Resilience Project.

Project coordinator Tony O’Malley said landholders and recovery group members had achieved strong results in the first two rounds of grants – with buffer zones and corridors planted for world-heritage rainforest, weeds removed ranging from guinea grass to raspberry, and the creation of nature refuges in Kuranda and Mission Beach.

“Last year, the landholders and recovery groups involved in this grants program achieved weed management work on more than 50 hectares of priority habitat, revegetation projects on over 17 hectares and 150 hectares of voluntary habitat protection agreements,’’ Mr O’Malley said.

Landholders enthusiastic about improving habitat

“The enthusiasm of the people we’ve been working with has been inspiring. Landholders are telling us the funding enabled them to improve their habitat so it’s looking the best it has in years, and they’re proud of the importance of their place to threatened species.”

Queensland Environment Minister Meaghan Scanlon has committed $3 million in funding for local-scale water quality monitoring in the Tully and Johnstone catchments.

This funding is to continue the water quality monitoring undertaken over the last four years as part of the Wet Tropics Major Integrated Project. The project has achieved unprecedented buy-in from the local community on water quality issues through bringing together Tully and Innisfail Canegrowers and the Australian Banana Growers, farmers, scientists, industry experts and Traditional Owners.

The grassroots, farmer-led monitoring program is answering growers’ questions about water quality by directly sharing locally relevant, nutrient, sediment and pesticide data from local catchments.

“Growers value and appreciate high quality local data that’s provided within useful timeframes. The local-scale monitoring of streams, paddock run-off and ground water enables us to build understanding about pollutant loss pathways and helps growers make informed paddock management decisions,” said MIP Water Quality Project Leader, Alicia Buckle.

Grower Services Manager from Canegrowers Innisfail, Deb Telford, said: “The Local Scale Monitoring program had such an impact in our district. To stop the momentum of this project would have been disappointing. This announcement today is exciting and is a positive step forward for the next three years. Grower engagement for this project has been encouraging and successful, we’ve had growers say we should have had this 10 years ago.”

Landholders are helping the Far North’s iconic rainforests and cassowaries by joining a strategic action to connect forested areas from the Daintree to Hinchinbrook.

Green corridors have been prioritised across the region and landholders are working with natural resource management organisation Terrain NRM and with community groups to buffer world heritage rainforest and to “fill in the gaps”.

Grants for revegetation, weed management and habitat protection are part of Terrain’s Building Rainforest Resilience Project. Two hundred and fifty property owners in important cassowary, Mabi forest and littoral rainforest areas, and members of threatened species recovery teams, were invited to apply in the first round.
A new grants round is coming up.

In the Daintree and greater Douglas Shire

Bloomfield’s Mt Louis Station manager Ben Morley is one of two Daintree graziers targeting weeds on the edge of the rainforest, while Douglas Shire Council has planted over 1000 trees in the Wangetti area.

Ben and Courtenay Morley have been creating buffer zones for world heritage rainforest and easy access for cassowaries, by removing woody weeds from non-grazing sections of the station along Gap Creek and at the base of Mt Louis and Mt Annie.

“The results have been fantastic. We usually only focus on the paddocks but after getting support, we’ve cleaned up 10 to 12km around the base of the hills and about 12km on both sides of the creek,’’ he said. “Among other environmental benefits, the cassowaries now have easy access to water and feed. We’ve learned more about them too, and we document sightings on the station.”

The Douglas Shire Council has planted 1000 trees and managed weed outbreaks in open areas around Wangetti to connect littoral rainforest patches and extend habitat for cassowaries. Both littoral rainforest and cassowaries are listed nationally as endangered.

In Kuranda

Nevenka Salinovic says tree-planting and weed management work on her family’s 130-hectare property has opened her eyes to the possibilities – and to cassowaries crossing the land.

“Our property backs onto world heritage areas on all sides, and includes pockets of remnant rainforest,’’ Ms Salinovic said. “Getting help with weed management and what trees to plant on the edges of the rainforest and sloping creek banks has been invaluable.”

The family has also been working with Kuranda Envirocare on the project, which has involved slashing and spot-spraying large areas of weeds including guinea grass, prickly raspberry and lantana, and selecting cassowary food trees for future plantings.

“It has been rewarding. We’ve found native trees in under and amongst the weeds, so we won’t have to plant completely from scratch. We knew a bit about cassowaries beforehand but not what they liked to eat and how to plant for their feeding needs throughout the year. Now we are seeing where they come and go – they seem to use our place as a path through to other rainforest.”

The Salinovic project, along with two other weed removal and tree-planting grant projects supported by Terrain NRM and Kuranda Conservation, is helping to restore the Black Mountain cassowary corridor. This corridor is one of the Cassowary Recovery Team’s top priorities.

On the Atherton Tableland

Landholders Louise and John Gavin live on a rural residential property adjoining world-heritage rainforest and endangered Mabi forest.

Ms Gavin said creating a green buffer zone for surrounding national park was their way of giving back to the environment and the farming community.

“We’ve only lived in the region for three years and we had no idea before this that there was a type of rainforest – Mabi forest – that was critically endangered,’’ she said. “It’s really good to be able to have a small project here that fits into the bigger picture of connecting forested areas.”

Three hundred Mabi trees have been planted on the Gavin’s property, with the help of local conservation group TREAT, to improve a revegetation site begun 10 years ago on the land. Weed control has also been a big part of the new project.

“Small grants like this give individual landholders a chance to help build the resilience in pockets of Mabi forest,’’ she said. “It’s a way for landholders like us to do something to balance the eco-system and help others to keep farming their land.”

In the Malaan area, Michelle Bradley has used her grant to kickstart a Himalayan Magnolia and bamboo removal project.

“They’re a really nice tree (magnolias) but in this environment they were taking over everything,’’ she said.  “We’ve gone from one or two appearing out the front to a tight copse of magnolias that nothing can get through. It’s a big job now to remove them all.”

The Bradleys live in the Malaan cassowary corridor, which is the upland part of Australia’s longest and widest east-west rainforest corridor.  They are planting cassowary-friendly trees to replace the magnolias.

Fifteen thousand young trees are sinking their roots into Tableland soil as part of a $2.3 million project to fight erosion, improve farming land and better protect the Great Barrier Reef.

Graziers are working with Terrain NRM to repair eroded creek banks.

“Trees are the long-term solution, and they work well when they are combined with earthworks in the worst erosion hotspots,’’ Terrain project manager Vanessa Drysdale said.

“Root systems hold banks together and slow water down in heavy rain events, decreasing the chances of topsoil loss and of further erosion.”

Ten thousand trees were planted in March and April, bringing the total to 15,000 since the project began three years ago.

Ms Drysdale said the latest batch of trees went into the ground at two cattle properties with waterways feeding into the Johnstone River. A new cattle crossing was installed at one of the properties and sections of streambank were fenced off at both spots to prevent more erosion while the trees gain a hold. New off-stream watering points were also installed.

The work follows creek-side revegetation projects last year at two Tableland properties – in a landslip area at Jaggan and along an eroded creek system at Malanda.

Hundreds of trees are being planted on a property where a mahogany glider was rescued from a barbed-wire fence – to become the face of an endangered species that is struggling for survival.

‘Warrami’ the glider was found entangled in barbed-wire 11 years ago and spent months recovering with wildlife carers. A tropical cyclone then ruined his chances of a quick release into the wild when it destroyed glider habitat in the Tully-Townsville region – but this led to an unusual and heart-warming turn-of-events.

Wildlife carers Daryl Dickson and Geoff Moffatt were given special permission to introduce Warrami to a female glider, also recovering from barbed-wire injuries, and the pair bonded and produced two young before being released into recovering glider habitat two years after Warrami was first brought into care.

At the tree-planting event recently, Ms Dickson said it was wonderful to see the place where Warrami grew up and to help increase glider habitat on the property.

Mahogany gliders are listed as ‘endangered’ and are only found in a fragmented strip of woodland between Tully and Ollera Creek, south of Townsville. The tree-planting event is one of several happening on grazing properties to connect sections of woodland as part of a $1.5 million project being delivered by Terrain NRM through funding from the Australian Government.

Terrain’s Jacqui Diggins said the property, located south of Tully in an area known as Warrami, was at an ecological pinch-point where rainforest formed a barrier to gliders between national park and farming land.

“In the past, the woodlands would have continued through areas like this around the national park where the habitat changes to rainforest, but they were cleared for farming,’’ she said. “This property is an ideal connection point. We’ve planted 600 trees, and another 2000 will go into the ground to connect glider habitat to the north and south.”

Mahogany gliders can glide up to 30 metres on average. It’s often not far enough in cleared land, with barbed top wires the most common reason gliders come into care.

“Replacing top wires and connecting relatively small sections of land can make a huge difference,” Ms Diggins said. “It helps gliders to move between habitat areas for feeding and it also helps in the flow of genes for this species.”

Property owners Deb Van Beek and Royd Blunden say the support they are receiving to recreate glider habitat has been invaluable.

Give people ownership of a project and it will take off like trees in the wet season – that’s one of the many learnings from 82-year-old Yvonne Nicoll who’s spent almost three decades caring for the creeks, swamps and hillslopes of Cairns.

Yvonne is part of the Trinity Inlet Catchment Management Association, which will celebrate a milestone at the end of this month with the completion of a project in the Wrights Creek sub-catchment that has seen more than 18,000 trees planted over three years.

The group has been working with landholders, restoring native vegetation between the creeks and headlands, and preventing exotic plants from taking a hold.

“When we first started it was all farmland, now some is going to be residential. We’ve created a wetland in a detention basin from a defunct barramundi farm as part of this project, and we’ve been progressively taking out African tulip trees. We are now growing the last Melaleuca dealbatas for this project in our nursery.”

A focus on harnessing the enthusiasm of landholders has been highly successful, she says.

“We’ve had projects over the years from Buchan’s Point all the way south to Gordonvale. In the early days, we relied on community planting days and a workforce through government-funded employment programs. We worked mainly with cane farmers.

“As many areas become fully developed urban sites, we are working with engineers and developers, then new residents. It’s as much about reducing exotic plants on creek banks now as stabilising banks, restoring native vegetation and connecting up with world-heritage areas.”

The association made a conscious decision to involve as many residents in homes backing onto creeks as possible.

“We began letter-boxing, inviting them to plant riparian trees behind their homes. We’d get one or two residents responding initially but once neighbours and passers-by saw what was happening, the requests for individual sites soared.

“We’ve been able to build up networks of landholders along waterways. We work closely with Cairns Regional Council so we can help residents with approvals and drainage questions, and give them trees propagated in our nursery.