Earth to Sea News, Issue No. 30
Gladstone Harbour, Queensland, where seagrass meadows and oyster reefs are being restored side by side. Photo: Jack Bain, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Author
Nicole McMahon
Conservation
Seagrass and oysters, planted side by side: the Gladstone trial an insurer is paying for
Seagrass meadows feed the turtles and dugongs and store carbon faster than a rainforest. In Gladstone Harbour they are being replanted beside new oyster reefs, in a trial paid for by an insurance company's foundation and run by the people who know the water best.
Innovations
Answers from our own paddocks: the farmers testing regenerative agriculture for five years
Regenerative farming has plenty of believers and not enough Australian evidence. A five year trial led by farmers' own groups, with CSIRO measuring, sets out to find what works in old soils and unpredictable rain.
Conservation
A cleared paddock near Coonamble is going back to Weeping Myall woodland, 968 hectares of it
Weeping Myall woodland once ran across the western plains and most of it was cleared for cropping and grazing. On a property near Coonamble, a farming company is planting almost a thousand hectares of it back, with the grazing to follow once the trees are up.
Global Good News
Orangutan mothers walk their babies to play dates, and it costs them: fifteen years of watching in Borneo
Orangutans live mostly alone, which leaves their young short of playmates. Fifteen years of watching mothers and infants in a Bornean forest shows the mothers fixing that themselves, walking further and eating less so the children can wrestle.
Conservation
Where did all the Christmas beetles go? This year's Awards for Nature will find out
A national network to find out where the Christmas beetles went, 25,000 native plantings on Ngarrindjeri Country, and a shorebird patrol at Shark Bay. Five projects shared $150,000 this week, and every one of them is the patient kind.
Global Good News
The biggest wildlife bridge in North America is working: crashes with animals down 91 per cent
Before December, the stretch of Interstate 25 between Larkspur and Monument averaged about one serious crash with an animal a day. Then the biggest wildlife bridge on the continent opened above it, and the elk started using it.
Sustainable Living
Twenty minutes with the birds: the Aussie Bird Count is on this week, and anyone can join
Sit in your favourite outdoor spot for twenty minutes, write down the birds you see, and press submit. That is the whole job, and last year nearly 64,000 people did it and counted more than five million birds.
Earth to Sea News, Issue No. 29
A lagoon ringed by woodland on Kendall River Station, Cape York Peninsula. Photo: Justine Hausheer, The Nature Conservancy. Good morning. This week
Conservation
Three cattle stations the size of a small country are now Queensland's newest protected land
Two stations on the Gulf Plains and one on Cape York Peninsula, almost 396,000 hectares of wetlands, waterholes and savanna woodland, are joining Australia's protected area network. Queensland bought them with The Nature Conservancy and two philanthropic partners.
Conservation
Uluru's mala are back to nearly 500, and a robot dog walks the fence
Mala, the rufous hare wallaby, vanished from the wild in 1991. Twenty four were brought home to Uluru in 2005. This May, Anangu, Mala Rangers and park staff counted them at nearly 500.
Global Good News
Up to three million people lived in the western Amazon two thousand years ago. Then the forest grew back over them
Fly a laser scanner over the rainforest of Acre in western Brazil and the ground underneath gives up its secrets: ring after ring of ditches and banks, dug by a people archaeologists now call the Aquiry, who may have numbered three million at their height.