There is great value in restoration ecologists acknowledging the rigor of ecological knowledge gained through detailed observation of landscapes over lengthy periods of time by those who live in those landscapes. That requires a view of knowledge that permits multiple perspectives: local, indigenous, and scientific, and recognises that ecological restoration in fragmented agricultural landscapes is as much a cultural as a biophysical process. This requires an understanding of and respect for the cultural attributes of landscapes, including the beliefs, values, and perceptions people hold about their local environment. Environmental narratives are emerging as a practical means of integrating these biophysical and cultural aspects, and also strengthening community recognition and assertion of its own strengths and importance. The agricultural region of south-western Australia, where large tracts were only cleared since the 1950’s, has many older residents and farmers with memories of the country before clearing. This is a poignant example of where the wealth of local experience and knowledge will continue to be lost until fully embraced by institutional stakeholders in restoration programs. Just as poignant and powerful are the many personal stories of those who have chosen to spend their lives in these landscapes on the work of repair and restoration. For the past six years we have portrayed many of those who work across the Gondwana Link area in a feature film (Breathing life into Boodja) film, a number of short videos and a series of stories highlighting individuals - their life stories together with their on-ground achievements - published in a regional colour magazine and on a responsible tourism website called Heartland Journeys. We see humanized environmental narratives as an essential tool for supporting community centred conservation efforts and ensuring valuable local knowledge is respected and used in large scale restoration efforts.

Landscape restoration at scale is urgently needed in response to the scale of land degradation, and is currently recognised globally, via the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. In the face of multiple global crises, landscape restoration offers local communities’ tangible means of taking hopeful and inspired action to repair their landscapes. Given the rapid need to accelerate restoration efforts, how do you achieve this at scale while also centring justice considerations, such as respecting social equity and decolonising landscape repair? Our research sought to gain insights for embedding just governance in large landscape-scale restoration (LLSR). We worked in action-oriented collaboration with Gondwana Link, a large landscape scale restoration endeavour in southwestern Australia, driving transformative outcomes. We applied a ‘bright spots’ approach (after Bennett et al., 2016) examining evidence-based exemplars of hopeful, transformative practice, to unpack the characteristics, enablers and barriers to drawing on the over two decades of experience in Gondwana Link. Interviews with leaders of six other LLSR endeavours operating across Australia and New Zealand contributed further insights illustrating various ‘bright spots’ characteristics and determinants. All LLSR endeavours took efforts to centre community-led restoration, and we highlight the differing and evolving governance arrangements that emerged to support this, including in response to fluctuating funding or policy conditions. We present key governance principles and practices for centring community-led approaches to restoration that supported these transformative outcomes.

New approaches to conservation complementing protected areas across privately owned and managed lands, that put communities front and centre of the challenge, are evolving to combat the biodiversity extinction crisis of the 21st Century. Biolinks Alliance was instigated by central Victorian community environment organisations - to support them with scientific expertise and to foster collaboration to ensure their local actions contributed to the repair of habitats and ecological connectivity over the large spatial scales required for effective climate adaptation. This presentation will show how integrating community, collaboration and science has led to two ambitious and innovative large-scale restoration pilot ‘Local to Landscape’ initiatives that cross jurisdictional boundaries and align the efforts of many organisations for collective impact at scale. The pilot initiatives engaged over 1600 participants, formed 13 cross sector partnerships and initiated 6 new restoration projects, raised over $1 Million in philanthropic funding, resulted in over 400 hectares under active conservation management and influenced Government biodiversity planning. The talk will highlight some of the key tools that have enabled effective community engagement, knowledge sharing, collaboration and increased strategic on-ground action: inclusive planning processes that combine different knowledge sources; trials of innovative repair interventions through demonstration projects; citizen science monitoring programs; and symposia providing the latest knowledge around functional landscape repair. The talk concludes that the pilot projects presented are both replicable and adaptable, providing insights for scaling community-led biodiversity conservation in other regions.

Gondwana Link is a place based and locally led initiative that aims to achieve transformative change across 1000kms of a critically important section of south-western Australia. The Link staddles the climate gradient from wet to dry, incorporating much of the habitat areas remaining in south-western Australia and building on a diversity of community led conservation efforts. The focus is on restoring critical ecological functions in the face of climate change and over 50 key groups, institutions and business have been involved, along with a plethora of individual efforts and contributions. This presentation will explore the evolution of the programs 23 year history (so far) including the structural adjustments necessary for survival of the organisation, key successes and failures, and the reliance on fundamental ecosystem science in a region where much biodiversity is still being described. This will lead into a discussion of on-ground works that are currently underway in the Link. In the last three years the program has worked with communities, First Nations (Noongar) families and organisations as well as private investors to enhance the multilayered benefits of landscape transformation. We will share our understanding of the old Indigenous truth that has been forgotten by so-called civilised people, that Healthy Country and Healthy People are mutually dependant. We will explore how the old custodial ways of Noongar people have refreshed our approach to restoration while also providing a critical pathway for continued care of land and water after initial re-establishment of native vegetation by local people.

Introduction: Re-establishment of native vegetation is a core element of ecosystem restoration activities globally. While the biodiversity benefits of vegetation re-establishment have been well studied at the local scale, the benefits arising from disparate projects implemented across landscapes have received less attention.
Objectives: Here, we present a model-based approach to estimate bird responses to landscape-scale, long-term revegetation efforts in the endangered Box-Gum Grassy Woodland ecosystem of south-eastern Australia.
Methods: Using satellite data, we first estimated changes in woodland extent between 1992 and 2017 in a 152 km² agricultural region. Then, using an occupancy model for 60 bird species trained on ~5000 expert surveys, we estimated a landscape-scale average occupancy probability for each species and a summary of bird biodiversity.
Results: Our analysis estimated that 6% of our region transitioned from woodland-free to woodland-supporting areas due to restoration efforts and another 8% transitioned due to other factors, such as natural regeneration. Among five vulnerable species included in the occupancy model, the Brown Treecreeper and Dusky Woodswallow exhibited an overall decline in average occupancy probability from 1992 to 2017 despite benefiting from restoration activities, the Diamond Firetail increased overall since 1992, in part due to restoration projects, and the Superb Parrot demonstrated gains independent of restoration. These findings quantify the bird biodiversity gained from ~$1.5 million invested in incentive programs between 1992 and 2017.
Implications for Practice:
• Restoration efforts accumulate over time, with contributions from many different incentive programs and organisations in any one landscape. However, reporting generally focuses on extent of work or site-level biodiversity outcomes.
• Our model-based approach addresses this challenge by enabling estimation of cumulative benefits from multiple projects across a landscape, potentially supporting future market-based conservation investments.
• Our approach does not replace, but relies upon, research and long-term monitoring that verifies outcomes and informs practice.

In Southwest Western Australia, extensive clearing since European settlement has meant that large-scale ecological restoration activities are required to recover degraded native ecosystems. Direct seeding is often described as the most cost-effective method for achieving restoration at scale; however, outcomes are often variable due to logistical challenges related to the handling and precise sowing of diverse seed types, as well as a poor understanding of the germination niche and local site conditions. As optimal seeding conditions in the Southwest continue to become more sporadic, it is of great importance to understand what environmental conditions best support the germination and emergence of native seeds, and investigate potential methods to speed up the scale of delivery. In collaboration with Greening Australia, Bush Heritage Australia, Wilga Farming Australia, Gondwana Link and Nowanup Caretakers, this research program investigated key barriers limiting efficient seed use and delivery in restoration projects in Southwest Western Australia through a series of field and laboratory studies, where we have set out to (1) evaluate the germination and emergence ecology of priority native species used in direct seeding; (2) quantify seed-to-seedling conversion rates across species, soil types, and sowing times; and (3) assess the feasibility of using conventional agricultural air-seeders to sow native mixes. All projects mentioned above have now begun, and in June 2025, the first successful direct seeding trial using a standard 18-meter-wide agricultural air-seeder was completed at Ediegarrup Nature Reserve. In this presentation, we will describe how we collaboratively developed the project's research agenda and the methodology used to sow diverse native mixes through a commonly used air-seeder. Working directly with on-ground practitioners to develop a research agenda that serves their interests, we hope this research will strengthen direct seeding outcomes in the Southwest and Australia more broadly by both restoration practitioners and the farming community alike.

The vast majority of biodiversity in Australia and worldwide occurs on lands that are privately owned or managed. Private landholders and land managers are therefore central to addressing the biodiversity crisis. As voluntary participation by landholders is fundamental to the success of private land conservation, understanding the socio-economic drivers of landholders’ decisions with respect to protecting and managing biodiversity on their land, is critical.

Some landholder decisions are driven, at least in part, by real and perceived opportunity costs. Understanding what these opportunity costs are, and how they vary across the landscape, can improve strategic decision making with respect to private land conservation programs. However, empirical data on this has historically been scarce. Reverse auction programs, such as those delivered by the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Trust (BCT), provide a unique opportunity to collect and analyse empirical data on the cost thresholds associated with landholder participation in private land conservation.

The BCT investigated this question via a novel research project. We used empirical data on landholder behaviour – specifically, their willingness to enter into covenants and the price they are willing to pay for doing so – collected through BCT program implementation, to train a predictive model of landholder opportunity cost for all private land parcels in NSW.

The project provides important quantitative insights into the cost of delivering conservation outcomes across a large landscape, which complements data on the distribution and relative value of biodiversity. Together, these provide a powerful tool for strategic landscape-scale planning, helping to maximise the outcomes and cost-effectiveness of Government investment in private land conservation.

These findings provide critical insights applicable to the design of private land conservation programs in Australia and abroad, crucial to meeting Target 3 of the Global Biodiversity Framework (“30 by 30”).

‘Stop the Rot!’, a musical about Dieback for the 2007 J-Rock Eisteddfod, was the beginning of a year-6 integrated program combining science, arts, and other curriculum-mapped subjects. Teaching primary school students about Phytophthora Dieback is one of the most important ways of educating Australians about this devastating plant disease.

Now, 17 years on, the Dieback Working Group (DWG) has reinvigorated a modern version of the Discovering Dieback education program, linked with the current WA science curriculum.
Discovering Dieback-2.0 encourages students to consider the threat Dieback presents to our native bushlands, while empowering participants to take care when using their local bush and own backyards. The effect of Dieback on biodiversity is explored, and the ability to easily stop the spread while enjoying the bush is a focus.

Through inquiry-based learning and locally relevant case studies, students learn why protecting native bushland matters. The program includes real-world examples of positive action, including community-led tree injection projects and the work of Dieback Detector Dogs, fostering hope and agency.
DWG’s Dieback Unearthed project, funded by the Western Australian Government’s State NRM Program, has seen Dieback Education events delivered in schools in the UNESCO-listed Fitzgerald Biosphere. The opportunity to talk with students about dieback awareness and the importance of dieback hygiene protocols to help protect our biodiversity has been received with enthusiasm by the local community and represents a step forward in delivering effective education and generating positive behaviour change for environmental biosecurity hygiene.

At its heart, the Dieback Unearthed project is a co-ordinated education and events campaign on Phytophthora Dieback which targets multiple key sectors. The project's primary objective is to bolster awareness, knowledge, and capacity in stakeholders surrounding the astoundingly biodiverse Fitzgerald River National Park; one of the last Dieback-free wildernesses in southwest WA.