Landcare NSW’s People Led Prevention project empowers communities across regional NSW in developing disaster resilience and preparedness skills.

In Autumn 2024, Murrumbidgee Landcare delivered a series of workshops on managing bushfires, floods and disaster preparedness whilst maintaining ecosystem integrity. The following local resources have been developed on Fire ecology, flood resilience and groundcover management to enable good biodiversity outcomes and buffer your property against natural events. All have a nature led solution theme.

Resilience of our landscape

Resilience is the ability of a natural area and its unique assemblages to bounce back from various events and pressures. For plant and animal communities this means they need to be self sustaining enough to recover fully from disturbances. This requires healthy and large areas to maintain enough natural integrity to be able to do this.

To work out firstly what type of vegetation (homes) you have for all sorts of life on your property you can use the Trees near me app or other local guides.

Trees near me and other online mapping programs enable you to plan for different vegetation zones on your property. You can manage distinct areas such as River Red Gum flats and waterways differently to White box remnants on fertile low ground to Grey Box Yellow box rises for example and understand what a healthy version of these areas looks like, how healthy it is, what habitat features are present and important and therefore how resilient they are.

Landcare, Local Land Services, local ecologists and field naturalists are all great sources of support on your learning journey.

In the Murrumbidgee region, a heavily farmed and modified landscape, a lot of improvement can be made to the health of natural areas through groundcover management, carefully knocking back vast areas of spring grass weeds and enabling native ground cover to flourish. Maintaining gully and creek bank vegetation to protect it from erosion and flood events. Reducing highly flammable weeds and encouraging summer green native grasses and herbs, all hold a lot of cost effective and practical ways to reduce risks and let nature do the work for you.

Workshops and Resources Packages

Bushfire – Biodiversity and fire preparedness in local landscapes

Creating safer environments through nature-based solutions workshops delivered around Tumut and Junee.

Flooding – Flood preparedness and bank stabilisation

On ground workshop delivered in Narrandera.

Creating resilient groundcover layers

Workshops around Wagga Wagga, Coolamon and Junee

People Led Prevention Project Ackowledegment