Before you can bring country back you have to know what you are working with. We are recording the land and everything that lives on it before the first weed is treated, then watching how it changes as the bush recovers.
A star picket, a GPS point and a compass bearing, repeated forever from the same spot. They sit at the camera stations, so every return lines up with the last.
A photographic survey logged to iNaturalist, timed to spring when the orchids and understorey are up. A full vegetation record to the state NVC method follows.
Four camera stations running from October 2026. One phase builds a species list and the pre-treatment baseline. A second is a bandicoot survey to the Commonwealth method. Stations for foxes and cats run unbaited, to the standard Australian method.
Acoustic recorders listening across the block for what calls after dark. Frogs after rain, owls, and the rest of the night chorus. No separate frog station, the recorders pick them up.
Soil samples tested for the DNA that animals leave behind, to pick up what the cameras and the eye can miss.
The fauna survey is built around the Southern Brown Bandicoot, a shy ground mammal and the flagship for this patch of the Hills. Design the survey to find something that cryptic and you catch everything else along the way.
Every survey carries a disease risk on boots, tools and tyres, so we follow Phytophthora hygiene year round. Identification from a photo or a camera is a first pass, never the record. A threatened species only goes on the record once an expert has confirmed it.
The public survey reports, what we found and how we found it.
Flora survey, September 2026 (PDF) →
Spring survey, September 2026 (PDF) →
The records, the camera captures and the growing species list will come online on this page as the work builds. For now you can browse the species found across the land.