Over the past 12 months Ecosure’s Ecological Restoration division has worked hard to control significant weed infestations across six catchment areas on land managed by Seqwater and crucial to south east Queensland’s water supply.
During 2014/15 Ecosure’s dedicated bush regenerators controlled a variety of highly destructive weeds as part of a large scale weed management project.
“Some infestations were significant, seriously impacting creek zones that lead into main water supplies and, therefore, requiring control to assist the future stability of those riparian zones,” Principal Restoration Ecologist Jen Ford said.
The work carried out in priority areas, as identified by Seqwater, was extensive and large gains were made. However, given the sheer size of Seqwater’s estate (60,000 ha) weed management will be an ongoing process for many years to come.
Ecosure’s efforts to control significant weed infestations now helps pave the way for the recovery of native plants and habitat. As the health of these natural systems improve, weed infestations reduce and are less of a threat of spreading further across the landscape and disrupting the stability of natural areas.
“Weed management is the start of the natural regeneration that our environment is totally capable of on these sites. The better condition these areas are in the higher the quality of water entering our dams reducing the amount of treatment needed before it reaches our taps,” said Jen Ford.
Bush regeneration requires many skills including plant identification (weed and native); an understanding and working knowledge of soils and ecosystem types (e.g. rainforest, wetland, eucalypt, riparian etc.); being able to determine the capacity of a site to recover and, therefore how, where and when to intervene; the ability to control a large selection of weed species depending on their maturity, habit (e.g. tree, vine, groundcover), where they are growing and what they are growing with; and the ability to apply a range of weed control techniques to suit the site and site conditions.
“On this project, teams worked across more than 20 sites that were all very different in nature as well as requiring a varying rate of intervention and methodology.”
“On any one day up to 20 physically fit and talented bush regenerators were working hard to control weeds on priority Seqwater sites. They did a fantastic job often in testing conditions, I couldn’t be more proud of the team,” said Ms Ford.
Read more about the project and see before and after photos.
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