After suffering bushfire, flood and covid-related delays, our flagship program Science Saving Rainforests has sprung into action and is quickly making up for lost time. Most excitingly, the DNA sequencing phase of the program has begun, with a number of species currently being analysed by Diversity Arrays Technology in Canberra. This stage of the project...
Big Scrub Rainforest Day at Rocky Creek Dam on Sunday 30th October 2022. What a fantastic day we had together at Rocky Creek Dam on Sunday 30th October, 2022, for our 24th annual Big Scrub Rainforest Day! The weather was absolutely glorious and there were so many smiling faces! With an estimated 750 people in...
Our new name better reflects the greatly broadened scope of our activities, particularly our flagship program Science Saving Rainforests, which is analysing the genomes of 60 species that will inform the restoration of, and help save from extinction, our critically endangered lowland subtropical rainforest and 30 of its threatened plant species. It leads the world...
Big Scrub Landcare would like to acknowledge the NSW Environmental Trust for supporting our project Restoring Critically Endangered Lowland Subtropical Rainforest over the past 2 years. This funding has built on Big Scrub Landcare’s long term program to restore critically endangered lowland rainforest. This involves rehabilitating remnants of critically endangered lowland subtropical rainforest and restoring...
Our President and Co-Founder Dr Tony Parkes presented an update on our Science Saving Rainforests program at the Australian Association of Bush Regenerators AGM a few weeks back. The program has been expanded from a total of 23 species to now incorporate 60 species – 30 key canopy and other structural species and 30 threatened...
Early historical accounts of settlement in the Northern Rivers make for a fascinating read and give us insight into what the Big Scrub was originally like. That the landscape was irrevocably changed is well documented, but what’s less well known is the role of flooding in timber transport and the changes made to the waterways...
By Mark Dunphy and Joe Harvey Jones People are always asking whether they should use water crystals with opinions on their effectiveness varying greatly. Some regenerators swear by them, including them in plantings of tens of thousands of trees, while others think their effectiveness is limited. With tree planting numbers ramping up by the tens...
After hanging up his hat as an investment banker in the ‘80s, Dr Tony Parkes AO and his late wife Rowena began planting rainforest trees on their Bangalow property. The pair, who were 18 and 20 when they met in Tasmania, had spent the better part a year travelling around Australia, but nothing impressed them...
Photography and insights from Big Scub Landcare member Stephanie and Leo Lymburner. In 1968 Di Mercer acquired a piece of ‘rubbish land’ on the Far North Coast of New South Wales, a block deemed ‘useless’ by its dairy farming owner due to its steep, rocky slopes. Di, who had been a keen conservationist for some...
A contribution from Big Scrub Landcare member Ken Dorey. I’ve always been a little disappointed that European settlers didn’t come up with a better name than ‘Big Scrub’. But with so much being unfamiliar to them, it’s understandable that many descriptive, rather than imaginative, names – like red bean, iron bark or bleeding heart –...
