The Better Bush program protects our catchment’s greatest assets and works to reduce it’s greatest threats.
This involves on-ground activities that:
- Protect threatened species and their habitat and improve their longevity in the region by removing or lessening threats to them or their habitat with appropriate fencing and pest management;
- Improve the biodiversity condition and function of remnant vegetation by better managing regrowth and therefore forest productivity using Farm Forestry methods;
- Identify important wetlands, which are rich deposits of nutrients and biodiversity and not well understood, monitor them and assist landholders to protect them by providing funding to keep them in good condition with fencing and alternative watering points; and
- Set up demonstration sites and small biocontrol field units to give landholders better options for dealing with broadscale weeds that affect productivity and the environment.
Activities for the Better Bush project cover the entire Burnett Catchment to protect and manage more of our natural resources. With almost 20 projects undertaking these tasks, and more, Better Bush funds have helped to protect Brush-tailed Rock Wallaby and Black-Breasted Button-Quail habitat; identified and protected significant wetlands in the Boyne subcatchment; enhanced the biodiversity of native forestry near Booubyjan; and provided management options for Cats Claw Creeper, Blue Heliotrope, African Lovegrass, Creeping Lantana and Parthenium.