23. Restoring degraded landscapes

First meeting was held 14-18 August 2006 in Canberra Second meeting was held 23-24 February 2009 in Canberra

PARTICIPANTS Linda Broadhurst (CSIRO Plant Industry), Leader Andrew Lowe (University of Adelaide & South Australian Botanic Gardens) Andrew Young (CSIRO Plant industry) David Coates (CALM WA) Colin Yates (CALM WA) Saul Cunningham (CSIRO Entomology) Maurice McDonald (ENSIS CSIRO ) Tristan Armstrong (Landcare Research, New Zealand) Peter Vesk (University of Melbourne) Participants at Second Meeting Broadhurst, Cunningham, Coates, Penny Atkinson (Greening Australia), and Bindi Vanzella (Greening Australia)

The first meeting established that a review of seed sourcing in the broadscale restoration context would be timely, given the current resources being directed towards broadscale restoration. Issues were talked through, and the structure and main conclusions outlined. Different authors chose different sections to draft, and they are expected to complete their contributions during September and October. Meanwhile, potential journals will be approached.

The question of effective seed deployment was deferred, being a distinct problem with a very large literature of its own.

The second workshop was held on 23-24 th February 2009 at CSIRO in Canberra. The main purpose of this workshop was to align the review paper published following the first workshop (Broadhurst et al. 2008) , with the FloraBank guidelines which drive seed collection for native vegetation restoration. The workshop was attended by Linda Broadhurst (CSIRO Plant Industry), Saul Cunningham (CSIRO Entomology) and David Coates (DEC WA), who were participants in the first workshop, and by Penny Atkinson and Bindi Vanzella from Greening Australia. The guidelines were systematically reviewed over the two days to produce a working document that advocates a more liberal collection protocol allowing practitioners to focus on collecting high quality, genetically diverse seed to produce better restoration outcomes. Once the working paper has been finalised it will be circulated to relevant stakeholders for comment and then launched on the FloraBank website.

Last updated February 2009