1: NSW state law obliges local councils to maintain any remnant bushland within their area; that provides for most of our work. Most of it is regen, but some of it is fire hazard reduction work.
We also get regular work from a sandmine up north, as they are required to restore an equivalent amount of bush whenever they want to trash a fresh bit. We get an occasional urban contract on a similar theme, where a developer works out a deal to fix a degraded forest in return for being allowed to build on a protected area.
The National Parks Service mostly handles their own regen, but they occasionally call us in if they have a big job to do. We have a regular contract that sees us sending a team deep into the bush for up to a week at a time, dealing with weeds in protected areas that are not open to the public.
2: As mentioned, it’s mostly subcontracting for councils. The contracts are awarded annually; the dozen or so local regen companies all compete for whatever they can get.
3: I had a mate who worked in the industry, and I was an experienced outdoorsy type already. He told me there was a company that was hiring, I called and got the job. I started doing it as a temporary thing at the end of my doctorate, but then I got sick and kinda got stuck.
Staff turnover in the industry is fairly high; it’s hard, dangerous work, and there’s always a demand for fresh bodies. Anyone doing it for more than a few months will be expected to acquire formal qualifications (Associate Diploma in Bush Regeneration as a minimum).
4: You’re aiming to get the forest to the point where it can manage itself; if it requires constant intensive maintenance, it’s a garden rather than a forest. A healthy forest will have a good mix of plants at all layers; mature canopy trees, midlayer shrubbery, groundcover, etc. It’ll also have a good mix of ages; big mature trees are no use if there aren’t any saplings to replace them when they fall.
There is a major industry focus on “resilience”. Instead of trying to create forests from nothing, we try to find places where a small effort applied in the right place will allow the forest to self-regenerate. You don’t want to do any more planting than you have to; it’s much better to fight the weeds off and let the native vegetation express itself and crowd out the competition. A healthy forest resists weed infestation, because all of the available water, nutrients and sunlight is already getting soaked up by native vegetation.
A lot of it is a bit counterintuitive. There are some weeds that we often leave in place, as they are stable, preventing erosion and providing useful habitat for native animals. If we have a site that is half good and half dreadful, we’ll usually work on trying to expand the good bit more than trying to shrink the bad bit. You need an understanding of the vectors bringing weeds to the area, the abilities of the native vegetation to fight back, the condition of the soil, etc. etc.
5: It is massively variable depending on location.
For example: you can completely destroy a mangrove or casuarina forest, but it will restore itself almost immediately afterwards. Both the seed and soil are supplied from upriver, and constantly replenished.
OTOH, in the dry sandstone eucalypt forests where we do most of our work, the soil is pretty much irreplaceable. Once it blows away, it is not returning within the timescale of a human life.
It is still possible to restore a site like that if you’re willing to expend a huge amount of resources, but it pretty much requires digging up and transplanting replacement topsoil from somewhere else. And you have to choose your “somewhere else” fairly carefully if you want to get the right seedbank and fungal communities.
6: I’ve forgotten more than I’ve learned, unfortunately; a lot of it fell out of my head while I was ill.
I was already a bushwalking mountainclimbing sort beforehand, but I knew nothing about the vegetation; they were all just trees to me. After a year or two of bush regen, I could wander through a forest and casually name and describe the lifecycle of every plant I saw.
These days, I can still tell the weeds from the natives, but I’m not great on the names and details anymore.
