River Action Plans are one of our key initiatives in the catchment to address water quality and waterway health issues. The plans consists of detailed assessments of the condition of rivers with accompanying prioritised management recommendations.The aims of implementing River Action Plans are to:
Improve water quality
Protect and enhance biodiversity
Undertake best practice river restoration techniques
Build landholder and community capacity to better manage waterways
Restoration techniques include fencing of waterways to exclude stock, which contribute to the degradation of the protective buffer of native streamline vegetation. Stock can cause bank erosion and instability, water pollution and increase nutrients and sediments to the waterways. Once protected from stock, the native vegetation often recovers well. Where the vegetation has been degraded or removed, supplemental planting with local native species can restore the valuable benefits of streamline vegetation. These include buffering the stream against nutrient and sediment runoff, stabilising banks and limiting erosion, controlling light and temperature of the waterways for aquatic life, and providing food, shelter and habitat for both aquatic and terrestrial life.
Local plant communities support the wide variety of native birds, insects and other animals in our region, conserving the range of species and playing an important role in local ecology. Revegetating streamlines can provide bushland “stepping stones” and “corridors” for movement of animals between areas. Further, by restoring healthy plant communities, the environment is also better able to cope with any diseases or pests that may be encountered.
Locally native plants grow easily and have adapted to the range of soil types and conditions found in our Region - in fact, they like them like that! Planting locally native plants also protects the local character of our region and enhances the natural beauty and Sense of Place we feel about it.
Under the RAPS program, GeoCatch was able to offer assistance and advice to landholders for waterways protection including providing funding incentives for fencing, construction of livestock crossings, alternative watering points and erosion control measures, weed control and revegetation of waterways.
For further information please contact GeoCatch on 97810111
