Project Description

AABR National Forum 2024 – The R’s of Restoration

Using the SER Standards to improve restoration project design – Lincoln Kern

Lincoln is an ecologist with a keen interest in indigenous biodiversity conservation and environmental issues. He trained in botany and environmental science in the USA, before studying environmental management at Deakin University in Melbourne. After gaining experience in Victoria, in 1993 he set up, owns and manages Practical Ecology P/L, an ecological consultancy and restoration contractor.

I wanted to reflect just a minute on the 30 plus years I’ve been doing this. In the early 90s I started my business, and I was probably the first regeneration business in Melbourne. There are lots more now. We had a community who wanted our environment treated better and they asked government to pass laws in the planning system, and to encourage people on the ground to better manage the environment. But the service providers weren’t there.

Today I can speak to a big group of professionals actually doing the work, and the volunteers who are contributing to the work as well. We need the people with the skills and the motivation to provide the services to get the job done.

Another point is that the drive for restoration and better protection of vegetation etc. used to be very personal – a council might have an officer who decided they care and would make the effort. Now, what has been achieved is institutionalisation, meaning we have legal and institutional frameworks that drive restoration work, not just one keen person.

Sorting out the R words: Using the SER National Restoration Standards to improve Restoration Project Design

Those of us who love indigenous vegetation and want to restore it have got ahead of ourselves. There’s a drive to do restoration and a lot of money gets spent on it. Many projects are nominated, but we end up with poor design and poorly thought through projects. We need a process to help plan better quality projects. I was very happy when the National Ecological Restoration Standards were developed because to me this is the tool that we can adopt and use to guide better quality projects.

Getting beyond “tree planting”! Lifting the quality of restoration projects…

Focusing on tree planting is often problematic – it sometimes destroys other rare ecosystems!

The conversation26 July 2019We have in society a focus on tree planting, as if that’s where we start. It’s not that we shouldn’t plant trees, but it is problematic when people think that it is the primary approach to restoration. Internationally there’s sincere people and multinational conservation organisations doing big world scale maps about where there’s no forest now, and we could reforest and address the climate crisis. An article in The Conversation talks about this in Africa where they mapped heathland, veldt, and savannah as a place to plant trees.

I thought we were beyond this in Australia, but recently I uncovered a report that highlighted a site in the Mallee region where they ripped arid shrubland, planted some trees, didn’t maintain or water it, and they all died. I’d hoped that Australia was not disregarding what was already present on a site, but it seems there are still people not respecting the resilience that is present on sites. We are also ignoring that other ecosystems besides forest, such as grasslands, wetlands and shrub lands, lock up lots of carbon. They also provide greater biodiversity. It’s important for us to upscale restoration work, and natural regeneration/assisted regeneration is what gets us there.

‘Tree guard dreaming’

I’m going to borrow the term from Darcy Duggan, who has left us but was always a pioneer in the regeneration industry in Melbourne. ‘Tree guard dreaming’- if the tree guards are up, you must be growing habitat. This approach has issues.

Issues of restoration design:

  • Councils, Greenstar rating system, etc are requiring local indigenous species for landscaping and open space but reference to local provenance plants, habitat and restoration design is not included in the process.
  • Little thinking beyond the planting of the trees and shrubs.
  • Is natural regeneration of some species possible on the site and considered in design? Less cost and better outcomes are possible…
  • Will further steps of habitat improvement be considered, i.e. additional life forms, logs and rocks at some point?
  • Transition to maintenance phase? Stages of restoration over time?
  • Can natural regeneration of remnant and planted species be recognised during maintenance?

I’m sure we all drive by some sites which you look at and see a lot of mulch and trees and a few shrubs. But have the designers of this project really thought about the future of this project eg. what kind of habitat will it be in 20 years? Tree planting and restoration projects are driven by government and not by practitioners. Tree planting is the big event and maintenance is forgotten.

trees destroyed to plant more trees that died

An example from 2018 in Northern Victoria of poor planning – Arid Shrubland ripped to plant trees that subsequently died

Sorting out the R words?

  • Revegetation: is used where the ecosystem is too damaged to regenerate naturally and the appropriate plants have to be reintroduced, for example by planting or direct seeding.
    https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/resources/cpp/RestoringVeg.pdf 
  • Rehabilitation: the action of restoring something that has been damaged, to its former condition.
  • Reforestation: the natural or intentional restocking of existing forests and woodlands (forestation) that have been depleted, usually through deforestation but also after clearcutting. (Oxford Dictionary).
  • Regeneration: renewal or restoration of a body, bodily part, or biological system (such as a forest) after injury or as a normal process* https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/regeneration
    *This word is widely used by practitioners: bush regeneration, natural regeneration, assisted regeneration and is accurate and useful
  • Ecological restoration: a useful overarching term? Ecological restoration is the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed.
    https://ser-rrc.org/what-is-ecological-restoration/

I like that AABR Victoria’s committee has reinvented the R words. We’ve got some better ones to guide us. Regeneration has always been the good overarching term, but too often it’s forgotten – assessing regeneration is the first step. Revegetation makes you think of planting so is limiting. Rehabilitation and Reforestation are also limiting the words. Restoration gives us the general approach that we need.

I would throw in another R word, which has problems for me. It is Rewilding – a word that we’re starting to use. It’s the Indigenous First Nations perspective that makes me think we should hesitate using rewilding as a term. It does refer to habitat and animals, but rewilding can be a problematic word because it continues colonisation to some degree, and this was based on the myth that our ancestors colonised empty wilderness, so helps perpetuate the myth of terra nullius. But it was someone’s home that they were managing. So we are not going to rewild it – we should restore the ecosystems and the habitat and the place that it was before colonisers arrived. So let’s be careful about the R words.

Horticulture/Gardening vs Ecological Restoration?

Too often we just do horticulture or landscaping with indigenous species and don’t see the opportunities to make it restoration.

To me there are two issues about gardening versus restoration:

  • Mulch – in horticulture, you put mulch down, you replace it. In restoration we shouldn’t put mulch down if we can avoid it and we should let it deteriorate and not replace it. Mulch might control weeds, but it also prevents regeneration. We can only afford to plant 6 to 10 plants per square metre, so if we don’t facilitate natural regeneration, we don’t get ecosystems back where 40 plants per square meter existed naturally and 40 plants is probably an underestimate as well.
  • In horticulture we say humans will replace plants over time. In restoration plants will replace themselves. This is about upscaling too. With restoration, we move on when sites have been restored to where they just need a bit of maintenance. There is a difference between gardening and restoration, and we tell people about this difference to get more restoration and maybe less gardening.

Horticulture or Gardening

  • Desired vegetation is imposed on a site and often based on artificially “improving” site conditions
  • Mulch is used to control weeds and replaced over time
  • Weeds are controlled as they appear, and herbicides may be part of the long term system
  • Humans will replace plants over time!

Ecological Restoration

  • Site conditions and context guides design objectives for habitat and indigenous biodiversity or hybrid ecosystems appropriate to the circumstances
  • Mulch is only used initially and allowed to decompose without being replaced or not at all
  • Weed propagules and populations are managed over time so that they are replaced by desirable indigenous plants – herbicides are tools at the beginning and hopefully not needed over time
  • Plants will naturally regenerate over time!

Latrobe Uni – Eco-corridor Design Guide

I did this design guide for the restoration of the Latrobe Uni Eco-corridor. Latrobe Uni has an amazing campus full of big old red gums etc. and lots of habitat beyond the eco-corridor. They have defined a certain zone that will be managed as native vegetation and will be restored.

The objectives of the corridor and design guide included:

  • Formally indicating conservation areas with significant areas of native vegetation occurring elsewhere on campus
  • Developing a consistent approach to restoration across the Eco-corridor
  • Providing guidance and resources to support well designed high quality restoration projects.

What I was able to do in this guide is hopefully provide detailed information and inspiration about how to do high quality restoration projects and to address the issue of poor design.

It includes the six principles from the National Ecological Restoration Standards for Restoration and Regeneration.

If you were thinking of introduction plantings, you would have to figure out the reference ecosystem. It’s a complicated site with lots of different geologies and different habitats. This is why we needed the design guide.

So what I tried to do at Latrobe was give them a check list to make it idiot proof to guide the design of a project. We also did some flow charts to help people make decisions because I was conscious that we might have people with very little experience and knowledge actually designing projects. We talked about habitat components. This is what doesn’t happen too often on projects. We are going to reintroduce rocks, logs and physical habitat components.

Take Home Points

  • We need to get beyond gardening/horticulture with indigenous species and simple “tree planting” AND develop “restoration” projects that develop diverse fauna habitat and flora diversity.
  • Follow the Principles of the National Standards for the Practice of Ecological Restoration which can be the tool to help guide best practice restoration project design to whatever level is possible.
  • Implementing the Principles can take much research and design beyond the skills of many land managers – local restoration project design guides can promote good quality consistent projects based on the National Standards.
  • Landscaping projects using local indigenous species could/should often be ecological restoration projects if the design is based on the Standards. This applies to a lot of public landscaping sites which are urban and rural habitats.
  • All ecological consultants and land management authorities should adopt the Principles of the National Standards for the Practice of Ecological Restoration as the basis and guide for all ecological restoration projects and many landscaping projects – they give us the principles to help improve the quality of the projects. They prompt us to ask all the right questions along the way. So we have taken the opportunity, in my business, to use the Standards whenever possible to guide the design of projects. It’s incredibly useful.
  • We should collectively start to see the Standards as the required framework for developing ecological restoration projects in tenders, Landcare projects, landscaping, etc.

To me the Principles of the National Standards for the Practice of Ecological Restoration in Australia, should be used in most projects with indigenous flora because they provide a framework for integrated and conscious restoration design and development of sites as habitat over time.

P.S. Lincoln talked in depth about his work at Latrobe University and for the Yarra Riverkeeper Association at an AABR Webinar. This is available on the video link right starting at 30 minutes.