Swift Parrot  Source: Brendan Sydes, Chair, Biolinks Alliance

Communities hold enormous knowledge and commitment to act locally for nature. Biolinks Alliance is showing that when communities are connected with science, expertise, networks, collaboration and resources, individual conservation efforts can contribute towards a shared vision for an entire landscape.

Central Victoria has deep roots in community-led conservation being the birthplace of the Landcare movement 40 years ago, when the first Landcare group formed in the small town of Winjallock near St Arnaud.

Biolinks Alliance grew from that tradition in 2011, when 11 Central Victorian Landcare networks and community environment groups came together, concerned that despite considerable local efforts, the region’s ecosystems and species were still in decline. In the 15 years since, Biolinks Alliance has grown as a network to incorporate 20 member organisations, collectively representing more than 200 Landcare groups and 2000 landholders, extending from the Grampians to the Victorian Alps and from the Macedon Ranges to the Murray River.

Over that time, Biolinks Alliance has developed a distinctive approach to community-led restoration: ‘Local to Landscape’. It brings knowledge, networks and resources together to return health and resilience to landscapes, regardless of who owns the land, how it is used and what type of landscape it is. Local to Landscape engages with the environmental stewards who know these landscapes better than anyone – First Nations people, farmers, landowners, conservation groups and volunteer organisations – to plan and deliver innovative environmental projects.

Spring Plains, near Heathcote, provides a tangible example of Local to Landscape in action. One of Central Victoria’s most renowned ecosystems is its Box-Ironbark forest. These forests are home to an extraordinary diversity of wildlife, from woodland birds and gliders to reptiles, living amongst an array of native wattles, lilies and orchids. But the forests we see today are very different from those that once covered the region. More than 150 years of gold mining, timber harvesting, clearing and grazing dramatically diminished and altered them. Soils were dug up and disturbed so that they can no longer absorb water, large old trees were removed, and many forests regrew as dense stands of small, similarly aged trees. Today, less than 1% of Victoria’s once extensive Box–Ironbark forests remain undamaged.

Spring Plains before repair interventions were applied: This forest is typical of the region, with even aged, densely spaced trees and missing ground and mid storey. The soils of the forests are hydrophobic, and the overly dense trees locked in an immature state. Photo: Cameron O’Mara

The local community in Heathcote knew the forests were struggling but did not know how to help them or the animals they supported. With local ecologist Paul Foreman, Biolinks and the community applied an innovative combination of proven interventions aimed at repairing the altered hydrological function over a 138-hectare micro-catchment.

Together, the interventions acted to slow water flow, improve soil health and water absorption, accelerate tree growth and promote understorey recovery – fixing the ecology of the forests from the ground up.

This site now serves as both an ongoing scientific trial and a living showcase of Box-Ironbark forest repair. Through continuous monitoring of the pilot site, and an adjacent control site where no changes were made, we are gathering valuable ecological data to prove our techniques are working and add to a growing body of shared knowledge. By involving the community in the monitoring, working bees and field days, the project has brought people and organisations together around a real landscape challenge and helped build the relationships, knowledge and confidence needed to catalyse uptake of the methods elsewhere.

A tour of the Spring Plains demonstration site earlier this year brought close to 50 community members out to this forest to learn about its unique ecology and what is being done to restore it to health.

A ‘benchmark’ Box ironbark forest: Showing a heathy understorey present, but is sadly absent in most of the remaining forests. Photo: Paul Foreman

The success of Spring Plains has led to the Local to Landscape model now being replicated in four more regions through the Goldfields Forests Restoration project – a major new initiative that has received funding from the Ian Potter Foundation.

The Goldfields Forest Restoration is a three-year collaborative project working with Biolinks Alliance’s member groups in the St Arnaud, Castlemaine and Rushworth regions, alongside Trust for Nature, Bush Heritage and the City of Bendigo. The project will establish demonstration sites, showcasing how to restore ecological function across 450 hectares of degraded Box-Ironbark forest. It will engage and empower landholders in those regions to apply these methods on land they care for. The project will build a community of practitioners, all working towards a common goal for the repair of a whole extensive ecosystem which is critically important to Central Victoria’s incredible biodiversity.

Participants at a field day at Spring Plains – learning about the history and ecology of the forests and how their ecological repair can be accelerated through restoring their hydrological function. Photo: Cameron O’Mara

Spring Plains has shown us that the appetite in the community to do more for nature is immense, and that investing in their capacity and supporting collaboration is how we can scale up ecological repair. To find out more visit: https://biolinksalliance.org.au/spring-plains