Transcript for Tackling Disaster

A Landcare facilitator does a little bit of a lot of things.

That way, I'm really connected to the community, I know what they're talking about,

I know what their passions are.

A Landcare facilitator can help community tackle big issues because we're there on the ground.

We're already connected.

We're standing here on Toorloo Arm, and there was no immediate impact with the bush fires, but people in Lakes Entrance were asked to evacuate.

It was dark, it was smoky, hot, there was fire everywhere. It impacted on absolutely everyone.

There was so much concern around loss of habitat and loss of wildlife, ground post the fires.

We worked with people to work out what their needs were.

Some of the projects we've been working on since the fires have involved threatened species, including monitoring for the ground parrot.

Some work on platypus and glossy black-cockatoos.

When you see a glossy black-cockatoo, you stop, and you get goosebumps, and you smile.

We're only looking at a couple of hundred glossy black-cockatoos across East Gippsland.

The Black Summer bush fires had a huge impact.

Glossy black-cockatoo lost a significant amount of habitat.

It's a specialist nester.

It's a specialist feeder.

They feed only on Allocasuarina littoralis.

They don't have a backup food supply.

And with 60% of habitat gone, if we don't start planting food security for the future, there's going to be a big gap in that food availability for the species.

And we created a plan to strategically get the species through for survival and persistence in East Gippsland.

One of the critical components of that was collaborating with other agencies.

Landcare was a big partner for us to have in that environment.

You don't have time to reinvent the wheel, and that's where Penny's work and her knowledge of on-ground becomes instrumental.

So the project we are currently working on together with BirdLife and Far East Victoria Landcare is connectivity into private lands where we can actually get that corridor working between public and private lands.

So any extra planting we can do to build on what is existing in public lands is going to see species persistence across East Gippsland, and Penny's knowledge of the local region, as well as her knowledge of the landholders that would be willing to participate in helping with the survival of the species, has been instrumental in this project's success.