Rainforest Restoration Manual for South-Eastern Australia

By Bill Peel

Rainforest Restoration Manual for South-Eastern Australia is the definitive guide to the recovery and restoration of Subtropical, Warm Temperate, Cool Temperate, Gallery, Dry, Dry Gully and Littoral Rainforests from south-eastern Queensland to Tasmania. All of these rainforest types were inherently rare prior to settlement, and today with depletion, feral animals, weeds and climate change, all are threatened – with many listed under state and federal legislation.

The manual presents detailed restoration methods in 10 easy-to-follow steps, documenting the research and trials undertaken during rainforest restoration over more than two decades. These experiments and their results will empower readers to uncover answers to many of the problems they could encounter. The manual is supported by a CD that provides important background information, with 32 appendices, a propagation manual for the region's 735 rainforest plants, an illustrated glossary and resources for teachers. Species lists and specific planting guides are provided for the 57 rainforest floristic communities that occur from the coast to the mountains between Durras Mountain in New South Wales and the Otways in Victoria.

Extensively illustrated with colour photographs, this book will empower you or your group to be able to restore, manage, protect and conserve the magnificent rainforests that are in your care. The general principles and techniques described will meet the needs of students and teachers, novices, experienced practitioners, community groups and agencies alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Release date: Jun 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9780643102040

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Background to rainforest restoration

Take the cows away and this old orchard transforms itself into rainforest

Durras Mountain, Murramarang National Park, New South Wales. Achieving effective rainforest restoration does not necessarily require long and complicated management or large amounts of money or resources. Here the old farmstead orchard – consisting of one walnut tree (yellow foliage), one cherry tree and one apple tree – has attracted fruit-eating species (birds and mammals) that have voided seed from the fruits of rainforest plants growing in the nearby rainforest remnants. The rainforest regeneration illustrated has been facilitated with only two simple changes: the removal of domestic stock grazing and the control of transforming weeds. On this former dairy farm, these relatively cheap and straightforward management actions have released the two ecological brakes that had previously prevented this orchard from returning to rainforest. This is the key to rainforest restoration: applying the minimum amount of effort to get the maximum result. The fruiting rainforest species that have regenerated include: Black Plum Diospyros australis, Red Olive Plum Elaeodendron australe, Rusty Fig Ficus rubiginosa, Climbing Guinea-flower Hibbertia scandens, Muttonwood Myrsine howittiana, Large Mock-olive Notelaea venosa, Small-leaved Bramble Rubus parvifolius and Lilly Pilly Syzygium smithii. Other rainforest species that have colonised beneath the expanding evergreen rainforest canopy include the shade-tolerant species: Bergalia Tussock Carex longebrachiata, Kidney-weed Dichondra repens, Cranesbill Geranium sp., Weeping Grass Microlaena stipoides, Australian Basket-grass Oplismenus hirtellus and Common Tussock-grass Poa labillardierei. The latter observations indicate that once there is a shady evergreen canopy, other shade-dependent species will arrive. This, in turn, illustrates another important component of rainforest restoration: that, with patience, succession will occur and that you – as the rainforest restoration practitioner – are not responsible for returning all of the original biodiversity that was once present on the site. In many ways, it is important that we do not try to complete the picture. There is an ecological, as well as an economic, reason for this advice. The ecological reason for stepping back at some point and letting Nature take her course is that we cannot know every detail of every niche that is available and when it should be filled. We could spend a lot of money and effort trying to discover this, to little advantage, because Nature will put it right when the conditions are the most favourable. The economic reason is self-evident: it would take an enormous amount of time and money to renew every last piece of damaged rainforest in the region. Restoration is about knowing when to act and when not to act. Maximising the effectiveness of our restoration techniques should be our aim, to enable maximum coverage and recovery.

Rainforests of the south-east: small, precious and unique

The rainforests of this region exist as a scattered archipelago of small island-like stands occupying fire-sheltered refuges across an otherwise fire-adapted landscape. They represent the remaining small and precious jewels of a once more widespread and magnificent rainforest estate. The decline in that estate has been going on for millions of years (as a result of continental drift and climate cycles). More recently, there have been cataclysmic changes to both the extent of rainforests and their remaining refuges. They are threatened both by habitat loss and by many more sinister and subtle changes to their habitat, which is being undermined by destructive and all-pervasive factors such as climate change, weeds and pest animals, even in the most remote and virgin bush.

Different but how?

Four things set rainforests apart from all other forests in Australia:

1.  They are refugia for taxa that are either ancient (mosses, lichens and ferns) or of Late Cretaceous to Early Tertiary origin. This means that rainforests provide essential habitat to species that cannot live elsewhere and which arose when Australia was still part of Gondwana, flowering plants were just beginning to appear and dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

2.  Rainforests are also shadier places than eucalypt forests, with more than 70% of incident light being intercepted by the leaves of the canopy (mature rainforests transmit a mere 4EV of sunlight compared with 16EV for eucalypts; see Chapter S4: Incident light niches (in nature and restoration): Table S8 and Figure S131). With many species not (or only rarely) being found outside these moist, sheltered, verdant and vaulted canopies, their fidelity to this environment is reflected in the many specialised life-forms and species that can cope with low light levels, including vines and bryophytes.

3.  Rainforests share their nutrients through very efficient nutrient cycling in the litter layer. This is possible because of the moist microclimate beneath the shady rainforest canopy. Unlike the eucalypt forests – where most nutrients are withdrawn before their leaves are shed (and the frequently dry conditions leads to heavy litter accumulation because of low rates of decomposition) – rainforest plants shed leaves with nutrients still in them, relying on their diverse and abundant soil microbial factories to release nutrients rapidly. The useful nutrients are then taken up again by the plants of the rainforest through their root systems. Rainforests plants therefore have a more ‘socialistic approach’ to sharing plant nutrients, when compared with eucalypt forests. You can test this yourself: how deep is the leaf litter in your local rainforest compared to the next nearest eucalypt forest community? In one example, students investigated this in the Warm Temperate Rainforest of Lake Tyers Forest Park in Victoria, which registered an average 2 cm of leaf litter compared with the adjacent Damp Forest with 15 cm – a relationship replicated across all rainforest EVCs in the region (Additional reading: Leaf litter: rainforest versus non-rainforest communities). The lower ground fuels helps to reduce fire intensity, when and if they do burn. The apparent fertility of rainforests is in reality held in the litter layer and the plants themselves, rather than in the soils per se. This, in part, helps to explain why clearing rainforest for agriculture leads to rapid nutrient loss and site degradation. This occurs because of the rapid oxidation of carbon, which destroys the essential fuel that powers the nutrient cycling machine, and explains why so many agricultural El Dorado’s on volcanic soils have fizzled out as site fertility plummeted soon after the clearing of the rainforests.

4.  All rainforests are sensitive to fire. Though most rainforests occur in habitats that have moisture as their main mechanism for avoiding or minimising fire’s impact, others occur in dry and droughty conditions: relying instead on topographic and landscape features to keep fire at bay. This habitat protection is augmented by their shade and lower fuel levels and higher fuel moisture. But there are also other factors at play: in general, rainforest plants have lower volatile oil levels in their leaves and these are less flammable (see Additional reading: Ignition times), their trunks have thin and non-flammable barks and there are usually significant breaks between fuel layers (all of which add up to prevent fuel ladders developing) that could lift a low intensity ground fire into the canopy to become a raging inferno. Most eucalypt forests are exactly the opposite and actually promote fire, with high leaf oil content, flammable litter, bark connected fuels designed to catch and burn into their flammable canopies. Consequently, in most fire events, fire only ‘bites’ into the margins of rainforests while entirely consuming the adjacent eucalypt forests. See also Chapter S7: Fire management at the local scale.

Each of these rainforest features contributes either partially, wholly or in concert to their rarity, conservation significance, threatened status and importance for biodiversity in the Australian landscape today.

Rainforest: from dinosaurs to present day

Rainforests have been around for a long time (around 60 million years), while some rainforest plants, such as the club mosses, have persisted from the time of the first forests on the planet, with the earliest records from Victoria in the Silurian about 400 mya (Richards 2000). Ferns, which are ubiquitous in most rainforests of the region, are also ancient, with the first of the ‘modern’ ferns appearing in the Early Carboniferous 250 mya (Wikipedia).

In the beginning, rainforests were dominated by conifers, but today (in our region) coniferous rainforests are rare (although they still dominate in some of the Cool Temperate Rainforests of Tasmania). In Australia, rainforests are dominated by flowering plants, which began to evolve when Australia was still attached to Antarctica and the other southern landmasses (Africa, South America and India) as a part of the supercontinent Gondwana. Rainforests comprising flowering plants and conifers were present on the (now) Monaro Tableland in the Palaeocene (65–55 mya), with some of the types recognisable today being represented in the Eocene Epoch (55–37 mya) (Peel 1999).

Rainforests arose in cooler, wetter times; and, as the Gondwanan continent began to break up, they have been adapting to the new climates of their Australian continental home as it has moved north for the last 60 million years at the rate of several centimetres per annum (about the same rate that your fingernails grow). Gradually, this brought with it massive changes in climate. Climate change affects organisms in one of three ways: they can stay and adapt; stay and die out; or move. Rainforests and their cargo of organisms have been doing just that and, while they have been adapting and evolving, there have been countless extinctions as well as the emergence of new species. This process of evolution will continue with one major difference: humans activities are now inextricably linked to the future of the rainforests.

Today’s rainforest climates are on the whole hotter, drier and less predictable than that of their ancestral Gondwanan rainforest home much further south when Australia was attached to Antarctica. The relative hostility of the contemporary Australian landscape (compared to the ancestral one) has meant that the rainforests that were once dominant in the Gondwanan and later the Australian landscape have been restricted to a series of refugia across the south-east. So how do these precious and unique forests deal with the travails of modern-day Australia and what is it that characterises these refugia?

Coping with reduced rainfall

Most of what we commonly regard as rainforest (also known as jungle, brush or scrub) is found in moist habitats, where it develops its classical mossy, ferny and vine-festooned appearance. Such rainforest types include Subtropical, Warm Temperate, Cool Temperate and Gallery Rainforests. These have survived by residing in moist or wet refuges away from fire. This is the best way to conserve moisture: live in a spot in the landscape where water collects (rivers, gullies and misty areas); where the sun doesn’t, or only weakly, shines (deep gullies and southern aspects); where rainfall is still high and reliable (in high mountains or smaller ranges in the hinterland behind the coast); or where it rains reliably over summer when evaporation is highest (such as in the subtropical climate zone).

Provided fire is kept at bay, some rainforests have adapted to lower rainfall or drier habitats where landforms shed water, such as rock scree or cliffs, or do not hold onto it well, such as on dunes. These are the Dry and Littoral Rainforests of our region. These contain species and ecotypes that have evolved to conserve moisture or cope with less (see Definitions: Differential rainforest definitions for south-eastern Australia).

Coping with an oscillating climate

There are three ways that rainforests and their component species can cope with this problem, particularly as this results in fire being able to access areas that would have been previously protected under wetter climate regimes. The first, and most obvious, is to live in areas where the climate is most reliable and stable, where low rainfall years are compensated for by high humidity (coasts and mountains) or where rainfall is highest during the periods when evaporation is greatest (localities with summer rainfall in the subtropical climate zone). The second way is to stay put and deal with the change in total rainfall or rainfall seasonality. If the wetter versions of rainforests are taken to be the archetypal rainforests, then this is well illustrated by Dry Rainforest and Littoral Rainforests that have many taxa from wetter types in the region, but (it is assumed that) the Dry Rainforest examples are composed of dry-adapted ecotypes that cope better with droughty conditions and lower moisture levels over longer periods. The third option for coping with changes to climate is to undergo modification of floristic composition through a combination of species loss and/or migration.

Coping with fire

Rainforests suffer badly at the hands of fire. If it is too frequent and/or too hot, fire gives their fiercest competitors, the sclerophylls (that already covers 99% of the continent) the opportunity to invade and take over. How rainforests cope with fire is a truly fascinating study. They have come up with a range of adaptations including:

•   shading their understorey to conserve moisture and keep their leaf litter and fine fuels moist

•   living by the sea where salt coats the fine fuels

•   breaking the fuel ladder by having canopies separated from ground or shrub species

•   having less volatile oils in their leaves and less flammable bark

•   living in wetter or moisture-conserving environments

•   relying on landscape-level fire protection mechanisms – such as deep and steep gullies, permanent water, rock scree, oceans, lakes, sandy beaches, dunes – and/or protection from less flammable vegetation types by developing on the fire shadow side of wetlands, succulent and salt-filled vegetation, or old-growth scrubs (with incomplete fuel ladders).

Coping with humans

There is strong evidence that the first Australians realised both the importance of rainforests for the materials and foods that they provided and that they were damaged or expunged by fire. These first people imbued their rainforest inhabitants with totemic significance and their individual stands with special importance, such as using them as birthing places. So, even though Aboriginal cultures used firestick farming to renew the sclerophyll-dominated and fire-adapted landscape, they also recognised the fire-sensitivity of rainforests and actively protected them from this threat by using fire itself. This cultural protection still occurs in traditional lands in northern Australia, and there is physical evidence in south-eastern Australia (in that several rainforest stands persist that are otherwise unprotected by climate, landform or fire-suppressant vegetation).

The rest of us have cut rainforests down, burnt them, grazed them, logged them, fragmented them, subdivided them and sold them, built on, in and around them, and then added weeds and feral animals for good measure! Unfortunately, there hasn’t been enough time for rainforests to adapt to our new ways. Given the rate of change we have brought about, it comes as no surprise that rainforests are in serious strife. If we are not to lose more of them, we need to give them some serious breathing space to help them get through this critical period of threat.

One statistic above all others exemplifies this problem. One of rainforest’s keystone species that is widely distributed in south-eastern Australia is the Grey-headed Flying Fox Pteropus poliocephalus. Our past and ongoing actions in this ancient land mean that this species’ population is halving every 6–7 years and in 100 or so years they will be extinct (ABC 2008). Their pivotal role as pollinators and dispersers of seed will be lost – only time will tell if our ignorance and avarice will cause their rainforest habitat to follow. Such a sad statistic is a call to action!

The parlous state of the planet: writ large so we can fix it locally

Conservation of biodiversity is at a critical juncture, with the viability and resilience of both individual species and whole ecosystems threatened by unprecedented habitat destruction and climate change (SER 2008) – both caused by humans. Many ecosystems (including many types of rainforest and their surrounding vegetation in south-eastern Australia) have been fragmented or significantly degraded to the point where they are now unable to support many organisms in situ. This is a trend that is mirrored worldwide in many of the planet’s ecosystems (SER 2008), including (with the advent of climate change) some of this region’s rainforest floristic communities.

Ex situ conservation can only ever play a limited role in the conservation of the planet’s ecosystems: being limited by scale, genetic material and an unfortunate focus on charismatic plants or animals that underplays the role of different trophic levels, functional groups, and biotic and abiotic feedback interactions. This particularly applies to soils and hydrology, which are often ignored completely (SER 2008). In simple terms: no habitat, no future!

It is also now clear that conservation only in protected areas is no longer sufficient because habitat quality in these areas continues to decline, as well as in the wider landscape, with many (even large) reserves not possessing sufficient variation in habitat, elevation or topography to allow for species adaptation during climate change (SER 2008). To properly address the current extinction crisis (both in species and ecosystems), we must not only preserve critical (core) habitat, but repair and restore the ecological integrity of the surrounding connected (or as the case may be, disconnected) areas of the landscape, so as to enable the migration and recovery of threatened (SER 2008) as well as currently rare or common species during this period of human ascension and domination of the landscape with its added complication of climate change. The difference between conservation and restoration can best be acknowledged as: ‘saving what is left’ versus ‘restoring what once was’ (SER 2008). This is one reason why Australia is aiming to create a Comprehensive Adequate and Representative Reserve System or CARS.

There is an inherent and inevitable complementarity that requires the integration of ecological restoration and biological conservation under a unified ecosystems approach (SER 2008). The message is that our best chance of combating the loss of biodiversity and the ecosystem services that are so vital to the planet (as well as that of human well-being) is to both conserve and restore. This is why the ecosystems approach that is espoused by the Society of Restoration International to improve ecosystem health and resilience (SER 2008) is also the avowed aim of this Manual.

Threats to rainforest and what to do about them

There are a range of threats to rainforest, which we have summarised into five categories and what we recommend you do to combat them. Many land managers have rainforest in their care, but may not be able to immediately fund or resource a rainforest restoration project. Here are five simple and relatively cheap ways of keeping the remnant rainforest stand in reasonable condition by addressing or slowing these threats until more comprehensive help becomes available:

1.  Manage for fire. This means excluding fire or removing past burning regimes that are causing the rainforest and its ecotones to contract. Remember, this may mean taking a landscape approach: by liaising with other groups or departments to achieve this aim.

2.  Stop clearing of both the rainforest itself and its ecotones while reducing fragmentation by maintaining physical connections with other areas of bushland. This includes a planning component to ensure subdivision does not subvert this goal (EGRCMN 2007).

3.  Control the transforming weeds in your rainforest by removing new or emerging weeds before they take control. Work from the least weed invaded areas to the worst; wherever possible, prevent further spread or seeding of these species (this may take only one or two stints of targeted work each year).

4.  Control stock or feral animal access to prevent or minimise grazing, browsing and antler or horn damage to vegetation (erect temporary electric fencing to exclude stock); regularly visit your rainforest stand to scare deer off, or cull or exclude them.

5.  Deal with any other immediate threat in the best way you can until you can get organised and do a more comprehensive job. Remember not to act in haste: you may make the situation worse.

While you are sorting out these immediate threats, you need to improve your knowledge and understanding of what you have in your care and thereby learn how you can help the rainforest for which you are the current custodian. Learn more by contacting and/or joining local agencies (such as councils or Natural Resource Management organisations) or the East Gippsland Rainforest Conservation Management Network (www.egrainforest.org.au). Useful contacts provide some other avenues for you. Find out who is doing what in your region: have a chat and volunteer! At least in the initial stages, much of the rainforest restoration advice you will need to get started is free, and there is a lot of funding support if you wish to go further in the future.

When you are ready, the next step is to begin rainforest restoration.

What is ecological restoration?

Rainforest restoration is both an art and a science; it is as much a social process as it is the act of reconnecting the frayed threads of a once magnificent natural tapestry. The essence of ecological restoration is to understand the concept of ecosystem resilience, which is the inherent power of natural systems to repair or regenerate themselves once the ecological brakes are removed. It is pretty obvious when you think about it: a paddock does not attract forest birds, but regenerating trees and shrubs do attract them, so, if some are fruit eaters, then the perches the trees provide will dictate where the fruit-encased seed is dropped and rainforest can begin to regenerate in that area.

Therefore the key objective in rainforest restoration is to undertake the minimal amount of management intervention required to reduce the threatening processes that will, in turn, release the ecological brakes that are holding back the recovery of the rainforest stand or site in your care. This approach seeks to use the regenerative power contained in ecosystems and their natural resilience to their best effect. Good rainforest restoration relies on the most efficient use of time and resources to ensure that the natural ecological processes that maintain rainforest do as much of the restorative work for you as possible (i.e. nature takes over what you begin). We cannot provide advice on all possible scenarios for the sites and situations that you will encounter, so we suggest that you use the heuristic approach that we did. Basically, if you do not know how to do it, make a start: just ‘suck it and see’. From these first steps, you can learn from your mistakes and successes and will do it better the next time through the process of adaptive management.

The following passages pay homage to the beautifully written introductory text in the Subtropical Rainforest Restoration Manual (BSRLG 2005), and are paraphrased with some local emphasis: In terms of structure, function and composition, it goes without saying that rainforests are complex ecosystems. Such complexity suggests that the process of rainforest restoration is likely to be equally complex. That would be so, if it were your responsibility to restore every structure or compositional component, and to revive every ecological relationship of the original rainforest stand. If that were the case, we would have given up by now and we certainly would not be expecting you to attempt the impossible either. It must therefore be acknowledged from the outset that this is not the task or the expectation. What is possible though, and what we can show you, is how to restore some of the key components of the rainforest ecosystem that will allow it to get back onto its feet and begin operating again. How can this be so?

Fortunately, what is less obvious about rainforests is that they themselves have an innate ability to be self-sustaining and self-repairing. To restore rainforest ecosystem functions you need to understand the key components of the system and how they interrelate (as you must if you wanted to restore a car). Taking this analogy further, the car will not go if you only pump up the tyres with air, but fail to recharge the battery. Both the mechanisms and the power fundamental to the ecosystem’s operation must be reinstated to the degree that nature can take over the more complex task of full repair (something, of course, a car cannot do). This is why, in rainforest restoration, we do a little bit then nature does the bulk of the restoration task for us. The knack is to know what to do, when to do it and how much to do, so you can step back and watch the rest happen before your eyes.

The main task therefore is to restore the minimum amount of structure and complexity required to reinstate the ecological processes that underpin the rainforest ecosystem. The Subtropical Rainforest Restoration Manual (BSRLG 2005) continues: Fortunately in many cases it has been shown to be both possible and feasible to restore the main-frame structure species (the canopy and midstorey trees) and rely on natural processes to restore the missing elements such as understorey, groundcovers, soil microbes, insects and other fauna. So, while it is acknowledged that rainforest restoration is not a simple concept, or easy to achieve in every context, it can be done.

Although it is clear that rainforest restoration can be done, this does not mean that it should be done. Is there a rainforest restoration imperative in south-eastern Australia?

The rainforest restoration imperative

Apart from their inherent habitat value and their status as some of the rarest and most depleted vegetation in the region, rainforests play some important landscape roles in south-eastern Australia (Chapter S2: Rainforest values; Landscape values). These include: fire and drought refugia for both plants and animals; provision of migratory species breeding habitat (with species from as far away as northern Australia and Asia visiting the south-east) (see Additional reading: Avian migratory patterns in south-eastern Australia); erosion control; and maintenance of water quality and habitat values for native fish and other freshwater and estuarine species.

Nationally, less than 25% of the original extent of rainforest remains (Peel 1999). While some types in south-eastern Australia have escaped this appalling depletion (e.g. Cool Temperate Rainforests), many lowland types (Subtropical, Warm Temperate, Gallery and Littoral Rainforests) have suffered greatly at the hands of land clearing, weed invasion, fragmentation and grazing. Historically, the major causes of decline have been land clearing and weed invasion. Today, land clearing has declined as an impact, but many threats continue unabated (such as weed invasion) or are on the rise (climate change, global warming, mega-fires, feral deer, pigs, goats and diseases such as Myrtle Wilt).

Given the range of rainforest values and the ongoing threats to its survival, it should come as no surprise that there is a local, national and planetary imperative to restore rainforests. If you choose to take up restoration, you will embark upon an exciting and challenging endeavour that has its own very special rewards, such as knowing that you are responsible for the creation of new habitat and the renewal of life (Appendix 1.1). You will be joining an ever-expanding community of concerned landholders, citizens and governments.

Regions covered

The rainforests documented for restoration in the Manual occur across five bioregions in south-eastern Australia (Map S1). These are the:

•   South-East Corner Bioregion: from just north of Bateman’s Bay (including the Clyde River catchment) to the lower Mitchell River north-west of Bairnsdale in the south, ranging from the coast up to the top of the Monaro escarpment

•   South-Eastern Highlands Bioregion: including the Errinundra Plateau, Murrungowar Range, the Central Highlands, Strzelecki Ranges and Otway Ranges

•   Australian Alps Bioregion: principally rainforests associated with the Baw Baw Plateau and other smaller massifs (Lake Mountain and Mount Donna Buang)

•   South-east Coastal Plain Bioregion: in a small area between the Mitchell River and Metung

•   Flinders Bioregion: encompassing the non-isthmus and mountainous areas of Wilsons Promontory.

Rainforest types covered

Should the need arise, there are 57 rainforest types described and documented in the Manual to allow for their restoration. These are described under seven broad headings (called Ecological Vegetation Classes (EVCs) in Victoria and termed Ecological Communities in New South Wales) and a series of more detailed subunits of these classes (Floristic Communities (FCs)). At the outset, it should be realised that the taxonomy of vegetation in general (including rainforests) is still in a state of flux and the typology listed below will in time be better refined with more study and greater insight. The italicised part of the name is the Floristic Community and inverted commas indicate that the FC and/or FC’s name are being suggested here for the first time. For convenience and clarity, we have listed the rainforest types by state. You will note that many of these entities occur on both sides of the border:

New South Wales rainforest types

Ecological Vegetation Class: Subtropical Rainforest

Floristic Communities:

‘South Coast’ Subtropical Rainforest

‘Tilba Tilba’ Subtropical Rainforest

‘Durras Mountain’ Subtropical Rainforest.

Ecological Vegetation Class: Warm Temperate Rainforest

Floristic Communities:

‘Sand Rivers’ Warm Temperate Rainforest

‘South Coast’ Warm Temperate Rainforest

Coastal Warm Temperate Rainforest

Sandstone Scarp Warm Temperate Rainforest

Intermediate Warm Temperate Rainforest

Hinterland Warm Temperate Rainforest

Coastal Ranges Overlap Warm Temperate Rainforest.

Ecological Vegetation Class: Cool Temperate Rainforest

Floristic Communities:

‘Southern Escarpments’ Cool Temperate Rainforest

Clyde-Deua Cool Temperate Rainforest.

Ecological Vegetation Class: Gallery Rainforest

Floristic Communities:

Perennial Streams Gallery Rainforest.

Ecological Vegetation Class: Dry Rainforest

Floristic Communities:

South Coast Forests Dry Rainforest (see Eurobodalla Shire Council (undated a)) ‘Grassy’ Dry Rainforest.

Ecological Vegetation Class: Dry Gully Rainforest

Floristic Communities:

‘Southern’ Dry Gully Rainforest

‘Temperate’ Dry Gully Rainforest.

Ecological Vegetation Class: Littoral Rainforest

Floristic Communities:

Leached Sands Littoral Rainforest

Depauperate Littoral Rainforest

South-East Embayments Littoral Rainforest

Ordovician Escarpments Littoral Rainforest

Disturbed Black Sands Littoral Rainforest

New South Wales South Coast Young Littoral Rainforest

Clay Loams Littoral Rainforest

Northern Deltaic Littoral Rainforest

Tathra-Bermagui Coast Deltaic Littoral Rainforest

Rhyolite Cliffs Littoral Rainforest

Goalen Head Littoral Rainforest (reconstructed) (see Eurobodalla Shire Council (undated b)];

South Coast Sands Littoral Rainforest

Broulee Littoral Rainforest

Estuary Berm Littoral Rainforest (unquadratted).

Victorian rainforest types

Ecological Vegetation Class: Warm Temperate Rainforest

Floristic Communities:

East Gippsland Coastal Warm Temperate Rainforest

Strzeleckis Warm Temperate Rainforest

Alluvial Terraces Warm Temperate Rainforest

East Gippsland Foothills Warm Temperate Rainforest

Hinterland Warm Temperate Rainforest

Wilsons Promontory Overlap Warm Temperate Rainforest

East Gippsland Overlap Warm Temperate Rainforest

Coastal Ranges Overlap Warm Temperate Rainforest.

Ecological Vegetation Class: Cool Temperate Rainforest

Floristic Communities:

Otways Cool Temperate Rainforest

Otways Redwater Cool Temperate Rainforest

Central Highlands Cool Temperate Forest

Central Highlands Montane Riparian Cool Temperate Rainforest

Central Highlands Montane Scrub Cool Temperate Rainforest

East Gippsland Overlap Cool Temperate Rainforest

East Gippsland Cool Temperate Rainforest

East Gippsland Montane Riparian Cool Temperate Rainforest

East Gippsland Montane Scrub Cool Temperate Rainforest.

Ecological Vegetation Class: Gallery Rainforest

Floristic Communities:

Perennial Streams Gallery Rainforest

Ephemeral Streams Gallery Rainforest.

Ecological Vegetation Class: Dry Rainforest

Floristic Communities:

Gorges Dry Rainforest

East Gippsland Karst Dry Rainforest.

Ecological Vegetation Class: Littoral Rainforest

Floristic Communities:

East Gippsland Deltaic Littoral Rainforest

Bung Yarnda Littoral Rainforest

Limestone Littoral Rainforest

Depauperate Littoral Rainforest

Leached Sands Littoral Rainforest

Damp Sands Littoral Rainforest

Granitic Headland Littoral Rainforest

Infilled Swamp Scrub Littoral Rainforest

Croajingalong Sands Littoral Rainforest South-east Embayments Littoral Rainforest Mallacoota Inlet Incipient Littoral Rainforest Disturbed Black Sands Littoral Rainforest.

CHAPTER 2

Understanding your rainforest and applying first aid

Was it ever rainforest?

Mitchell River Silt Jetties (looking upstream at Eagle Point), Victoria. One of the great joys of undertaking the process of rainforest restoration then compiling our results into the Manual, has been to employ the heuristics (or ‘suck it and see’) approach to working through questions from first principles. Even more satisfying is then ‘tripping over’ the validation of the tentative conclusions that you had earlier drawn.

In the contemporary absence of rainforest at this site, the evidence fed into the Divination Tool model included: rainforest landform habitat; grassy ecosystem + water + landform-based protection from fire; similar landforms further east in the region having rainforest still present or known historically; and a smattering of not particularly high-fidelity rainforest species, (some of) which may have arrived from later plantings. This is a classic case of the best available evidence, being that of a comparison with other similar landforms and situations in the region. Using the Rainforest Divination Tool, the left bank scored: 85 and the right bank 75 (both at the lower end of the category: ‘Could have been rainforest in the past’). This photograph of the area that we subjected to the Rainforest Divination Tool was taken around 1866–1885 (www.pictureaustralia.com). The rainforest elements include: Lilly Pilly Syzygium smithii behind the seated woman (on the left bank: right-hand side of image), Sweet Pittosporum P. undulatum on the cliff itself and that dark and gloomy vegetation downstream of the cliffs on the right bank (left-hand side of image), which is likely to be a stand of rainforest. Interestingly a local colonial landscape artist by the name of Seehuzan captured the same right bank at that spot in his painting, (including a rainforest vine) and this further reinforced the tentative conclusion of the Divination Tool that the site could once have been rainforest.

It was not until June 2008 that this photograph came into the purview of the author, confirming the modelled results. This photograph is a perfect illustration of the heuristic process (i.e. its value when knowledge is not complete and evidence is scant) and the wonderful eureka moment experienced by the author when shown it in June 2008. (Photograph sourced from Monash University Centre for Gippsland Studies, with thanks to John Pearson for ‘discovering’ it.)

Restoring rainforest

Rainforest restoration is both an art and a science. By taking the time to develop your restoration skills, you will find the individual restoration tasks relatively easy (and very enjoyable). While the overall job may be complex on some sites, success is achievable if you follow the steps provided, and learn to experiment and improve your techniques along the way. Restoration does not suit everyone’s interests, time, money or abilities: it can be an expensive process (though not always) that may take many years of commitment to complete. Reading the Manual should sort out whether restoration is for you. Even if rainforest restoration is not your cup of tea (for whatever reason), your site can still be restored by engaging someone who is an expert in the field.

Rainforest ecology: a crash course

A crash course in rainforest ecology will prepare you for the instructions in the Manual. If you wish to know more about the concepts and principles, seek out the appropriate sections of the Supplement where they are discussed in detail and skim through the table of contents in Additional reading. The following concepts and ideas are arranged roughly in the order that you will come across them in the Manual.

Why is proximity to other rainforests important?

Rainforests are ‘islands in a sea’ of fire-dependent eucalypt forest and other vegetation (Bowman 2000). Individual rainforests stands in south-eastern Australia tend to be congregated in the landscape as a series of islands that are genetically connected as an archipelago through dispersal. Dispersal can occur through pollen, seed or fragments. In order for them to ‘communicate genetically’, and to maintain their vigour as individual species and as rainforest stands as a whole, they have to be within dispersal distance of one or more rainforest islands containing the same species. This connectivity is partly related to the distribution fire refuges and the genetic interconnections between the plants in the rainforest islands, which in turn are dependent on the plant’s dispersal mode and how far each plant’s propagules can travel. This latter factor puts a limit on how isolated your rainforest stand can be before it is effectively disconnected from the other stands in its local ‘rainforest archipelago’. Research in south-eastern Australia suggests that this dispersal connectivity is somewhere between 1 and 30 km (depending on the dispersal agent and its availability).

Rainforests (other than Cool Temperate Rainforest) are heavily dependent on fruit-based dispersal, which is mostly enacted by animals and, to a much lesser degree, by wind, gravity and water. This is in stark contrast to the adjacent Sclerophyll Forest as the following example illustrates. East Gippsland Foothills Warm Temperate Rainforest has, on average, 19 species with bird-dispersed seeds and/or fruit, compared with the adjacent non-rainforest eucalypt-dominated EVC (Damp Forest), which has only nine species