Dr John Harris of RiffleRun, Bootawa has been awarded a grant of $6000 over three years from the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife.
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Dr Harris, a biologist who specialises in river ecology and freshwater fisheries and is an adjunct associate professor at the Centre for Ecosystem Science, UNSW, first started his bush regeneration work at RiffleRun in 2002.
Over the years he has had additional assistance from Local Land Services, and a Fisheries Habitat Grant from NSW Department of Primary Industries, as well as help from a Green Army team.
Dry Harris’s objective is to return the land to it’s pre-agricultural state.
“One of our main aims in coming to live here was to enjoy a closer connection with the natural world,” Dr Harris said.
“Also we are keen to do what we can to restore some of the environmental values that have been lost from this area. This area has a long history of cattle grazing, originally mostly for dairying, and there has also been some cropping.
“It has become, in practice, a conservation area, but we just call it RiffleRun. We don’t distinguish it by any particular title like conservation area but that’s what it is in practice,” Dr Harris said.
The largest chunk of labour spent on the bush generation work goes into weed reduction and planting trees.
“The overall aim is to eventually begin the re-establishment of a forest canopy over the land that is representative, in a broad sense, of the natural distribution of forest and tree communities in this region,” Dr Harris said.
“It’s pretty hard to determine just what that really was, because the sorts of forest communities that you see around here are mostly pretty much manipulated by forestry practice and they don’t really represent what used to be the natural distribution.
“We had to go back to the original survey records of the first surveys on the place to get a better understanding of what condition it naturally had.”