Seeding Natives Incorporated specialises in the ground up ecological restoration of grasslands and associated ecosystems.
It takes more than just trees and shrubs to create a functioning ecosystem!
At Seeding Natives we tailor habitat restoration for the species it is designed to house including the specific requirements of threatened species. Past attempts to link or restore these areas have primarily focussed on overstorey trees and shrubs rather than the species rich ground flora of herbaceous plants and grasses.
The current ecologiacal restoration practices that are entrenched in our industry predominantly revolve around tree and shrub planting with tube-stock and ongoing weed control, these systems are not highly functioning ecosystems. Seeding Natives have the answers to build functioning ecosystems from the ground up, starting with the grasslands! We are changing the environmental restoration practices in South Australia thast are typically only producing mediocre results.
Native vegetation and specifically grassy woodland plant associations have been poorly conserved or highly modified in most areas of the Adelaide Mount Lofty Ranges (AMLR). They were recognised federally as endangered by the Australian Nature Conservation Agency in March 1993. There is little connectivity between the few patches of grassy woodland remaining.
Figures from an AMLR Natural Resources (NR) report in 2014 shows that the region has had 38 flora and 37 fauna extinctions (13 mammals, 13 birds, 6 reptile/amphibians, 4 fish and 1 insect). Another 212 fauna species and 827 flora species are threatened with extinction. One thing they all have in common is that they are dependent on a complete functioning ecosystem comprising of diverse native grassland species that have largely been eradicated. SA Professor Hugh Possingham and Associate Professor David Paton first raised their concerns about species loss in 2000 and 2001.
In the current Natural Resources Management (NRM) plan, it states that 150,000 Ha of habitat restoration is required to reverse the current trend of species extinctions. Our SA native grasslands stand at 1% (99% lost). According to the Atlas of South Australia (1986), in 1836, only 1.2% of the state's vegetation was forest. The habitat restoration focus must be on biodiversity and ecosystem reconstruction with an emphasis on the complexity of native grassland vegetation communities, not just tree planting.
Aims
The aims of Seeding Natives Incorporated are to:
We continue the development of innovative breakthrough machinery for sowing and harvesting native seeds to further increase production volumes of highly valuable native seeds. Through working in partnership with Bob Myers of the Native Grass Resource Group, seeding methods and innovation of traditional farming machinery has been successfully developed and can perform a task previously thought impossible with difficult to sow Australian native seeds.
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