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Large scale regional projects

Title: Large scale regional projects: Potential Living Laboratories for Ecological Experiments

Dates: 22nd February 1:15pm to 5:30pm

Location: Lecture Theatre, Goodman Building, Botanic Gardens

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Context:

There is an opportunity for large scale regional implementation projects related to terrestrial habitat restoration to be used for unique research programs.

The River Murray Forest (RMF) project is a good example. It is a State Government initiative, jointly delivered by DEH and DWLBC. The RMF project’s major goal is to establish 2.5 million trees via permanent, regionally native plantings into the River Murray corridor. Another example is the Habitat 141 project, designed to restore habitat at a landscape scale between national park areas of South Australia and Victoria with the intention to create habitat corridors between existing native habitat refuges to increase the resilience of populations of native species in this region.

Speakers will describe these projects in more detail and give presentations on goal-based biodiversity conservation, followed by discussions identifying gaps in the knowledge and how to fill them, implementation and resource issues, and ideas for future research and development.

The opportunity exists to explore the implementation of on-ground, long-term experiments in restoration in a range of fields including seed sourcing, tree provenancing, faunal habitat creation, direct seeding, density dependency, successional planting and landscape design. This is likely to be relevant to other agricultural regions of the State and produce scientific knowledge of international significance.

Objectives:

• Description of River Murray Forest Program and the Habitat 141 Project (and more specifically the Murray Mallee component of the proposed project ) and their objectives
• What are the gaps in our knowledge that inhibit our ability to roll out landscape scale ecological restoration programs? Of these, what could be answered by implementing a clever design of large scale, habitat restoration projects?
• What are the practicalities of implementing the large-scale restoration projects as an experiment? What are the practical designs that could be implemented? Who should be responsible? How could researchers make use of the design? What is the best way of garnering resources to undertake the research?
• Long term experiment set up with current resources
• What are key research questions that could be addressed through partnered research (e.g. ARC linkage)?

To download flyer click here.

Nigel Willoughby: Introduction to the Habitat 141 project and the Murray Mallee component in SA
Presentation

Damian Pearce: Introduction to RMF and practicalities of implementing experimental components
Presentation (coming soon)

Lee Heard: RMF biodiversity metric
Presentation

Darren Willis: Lessons from the Upper South East programme
Presentation

Andy Lowe: Set the context of goal-based biodiversity conservation and restoration programmes
Presentation