Technical help and in-kind support
Many organisations can help you develop your application.
Local councils can:
- give you relevant plans, reports and strategies
- tell you about local environmental projects.
Local Land Services can:
- help you obtain funds
- connect you with regional programs.
The Australian Association of Bush Regenerators can help with bush regeneration projects.
The Environmental Trust can advise on how to plan and monitor restoration projects.
Guidelines for bush restoration projects
We receive many applications for grants to restore degraded bushland. Here’s some general advice that can help make your project successful:
- Make sure your group (including contractors) is big enough to carry out your project.
- Plan to do the primary work (for example, removing weeds) only on areas where you can do adequate follow-up as part of the same project.
- Allowing natural regeneration is the best approach and you should allow enough time for this to happen. If there aren’t enough seeds in the soil for regeneration to occur naturally, revegetation through planting is the next best option. If you intend to do this, you will need to justify it in your grant proposal.
- You will need to comply with the relevant sections of any local or regional plans of management, environmental studies or assessments.
- Right at the beginning, set up ways to monitor the progress and success of your project. You will need to capture baseline information (that is, information about the situation before your project starts). See our Guide to monitoring ecological restoration projects (PDF 1.17MB).
- You will need to work out how you are going to maintain your site(s) after the grant funding finishes.
Bush regeneration teams
If we fund your project, we expect that you will use bush regeneration contractors and their staff who have qualifications, licences and experience in line with industry standards.
As a general guide:
- bush regeneration team supervisors should be qualified at a Certificate III or higher level in Conservation and Land Management (CALM)
- regenerators should be qualified at a Certificate II or higher level
- trainees should at least be enrolled in Certificate II
- all regenerators are trained in First Aid and Chemical Application (AQIS III) as part of Certificate II. Licences must be updated every 3 years through a refresher course.
Try to find contractors from your local area.
Travel costs are generally included in the agreed hourly rate.
Some projects will require additional travel costs, materials or specific skills (for example, rope work). If you ask us for special funding of this kind, you will need to give us details of why it is needed.
Revegetation
It is best to allow enough time for bush areas to regenerate by themselves. However, in some cases you may be able to justify revegetating (collecting seeds, propagating plants and planting them out).
If you are going to revegetate, you should:
- source plants or seed in a way that maintains genetic diversity
- plant with the same diversity and spacing as the reference community (the plant community you are taking as a guide)
- consider long-stem (deep) planting if you are planting near a river.
Threatened species and endangered ecological communities
Your project may be aimed at restoring habitat for threatened species or endangered ecological communities. If it is, you will need a licence from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW).
Discuss your project with a departmental staff member before you put in your grant application. In your application, you will need to include the staff officer’s name and confirmation of your discussions.
Some licence applications can take a long time to process. You should ask the departmental officer how long it might take to get a licence.
Saving our Species (SoS) is a DCCEEW program to secure threatened plants and animals in the wild in New South Wales. You can use SoS to identify the type of management required for every threatened species in New South Wales.