Enhancing Riparian Restoration Through Improved Monitoring and Collaboration (#90)
Stephanie Phillips
1
,
Jamie Kaye
1
,
Sacha Jellinek
2
- Water Technology, Wangaratta, VIC, Australia
- University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
- Melbourne Water invests substantial resources each year to improve the health and amenity of our waterways and the organisation has a responsibility to maximise the ecological and social benefits of that investment. Riparian revegetation intervention works are fundamental to the improvement of waterway health and amenity and our aim is to build on the knowledge of those methods to maximise success and minimise effort and expense in future works.
- A new long-term revegetation monitoring program, Restoration Outcomes Monitoring Protocol (ROMP) has been developed to assess areas before planting and repeating assessments at least for 20 years post establishment. The protocol considers a range of plant attributes (e.g., origin/weediness, cover/abundance, species/diversity, structure, recruitment mode, canopy presence). Revegetation success or failure is then related back to original establishment techniques and subsequent ongoing maintenance to identify what approaches work most efficiently. Revegetation areas are also compared to target (remnant) habitats over time.
- We have learned how to overcome a number of difficulties in large scale monitoring establishment, e.g., negotiating with multiple landholders and project managers, aligning monitoring with planting prior to works. We have also identified that many factors influence plant establishment and survival, and these factors need to be identified and recorded over the long term in order to understand revegetation success or failure.
- This work aims to develop knowledge in the best practice revegetation techniques to restore structurally and functionally diverse landscapes across many different riparian landscapes. With better monitoring we can understand what approaches deliver the greatest revegetation success and these efficiencies will improve confidence in investment and environmental outcomes.
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