Caring for our landscapes with Landcare
Contributed by Ethan Mimnaugh, Mooloolah Landcare Nursery
The first week of August is Landcare Week! This is a week for celebrating Landcare organisations, and their incredible volunteers, all over the country.
Landcare organisations are committed to improving the health of the landscape, but also to improving the relationships between communities and environment.
Today I’m going to go through the general processes required when managing your landscape; and how you, your local Landcare, and your home can work together towards a healthier future.
Managing and restoring a landscape comes in many flavours ranging from engineering and earthworks, to simply watching and waiting. While engineering is an effective method of managing the landscape, earthworks should be done with extreme caution as they cannot easily be undone.
Less invasive engineering methods include armouring high-erosion areas with carefully placed rocks, or staking coconut-coir erosion rolls against slopes to catch silt and slow runoff.
These engineering methods for management are often larger scale, cost more, and are only required on heavily degraded sites. Often, works like this are saved for productive agricultural land, or important water systems. For example, if you live upstream from Ewen Maddock Dam (Addlington Creek), then you may be eligible to get free engineering work, if needed, from SEQ Water.
This is something that Mooloolah River Landcare can assist you with, as we work very closely with SEQ Water in that area.
Most of the time, you won’t need to go so far in order to manage your landscape. The next type of management I want to mention is revegetation. This involves planting new plants (or sowing seeds) across a landscape.
The plant selection is extremely important, with a very effective mix being 50% pioneer species, 25% canopy species, and 25% other species.
One must also consider the ecosystem that their landscape naturally creates. By coming into Mooloolah Landcare (or another local not-for-profit Landcare), you can learn about what your ecosystem would’ve been like in the past (regional ecosystem – preclear), and which native plants will be the best pioneers in order to kickstart the natural healing process.
The final method of managing a landscape is the cheapest, easiest, and has the least chance of going wrong. This is the regeneration method and it is very simple.
It involves allowing the landscape to regenerate itself via natural processes. Usually, this means managing weed infestations, while allowing as many native plants to grow and compete in an area as possible.
Birds will be your best friend, as they deliver seeds from bushland all over the area, so planting native, fruit-bearing trees will expedite the regeneration process immensely.
If the landscape is being disturbed or degraded by human activity such as overgrazing, mismanagement of water flow, vehicular destruction, or something else, then it is important to manage that process, either by stopping it, mitigating it, or replacing it with another process.
Learning all the native plants, especially the pioneers, will greatly help in this method as you will be able to tell which plants are desirable in your regeneration, and which will become problematic.
Coming down to Mooloolah Landcare, or any other Landcare near you, will be a great way to learn the native plants, and to learn about which weeds are most common and most damaging in your ecosystem.
You can volunteer and learn a whole lot about native plants as we talk botany all day, buy some local botanical books, or simply come visit, become a member, and spend some time chatting and learning about the natural beauty of your area.