Coming into the winter months, revegetation will become a focus of LHIB’s biodiversity restoration activities.

Blackburn Island has been visited during winter each year since 2018, avoiding the Wedge-tailed Shearwater nesting season. With the assistance of the Friends of Lord Howe Volunteer Group, LHIB’s World Heritage and Weed Eradication teams undertake weeding and maintenance of the 3,500+ native trees that have been planted.

 As native vegetation becomes more established, the island’s habitat is able to better support the threatened LHI Gecko and Skink, Wood-feeding Cockroach, and many birds.

The Sallywood Swamp Forest revegetation site in Pinetrees Lodge’s back paddock has also had a good succession rate with plants in the ground. Over this winter, an additional 500 Sallywoods will be planted.

LHIB partnered with Pinetrees in 2018 to restore a large patch of the critically endangered endemic plant community. 

It is estimated that more than 95% of the original forest was lost through decades of grazing. This project aims to double the amount of Sallywood Swamp Forest on the Island by 2030, creating habitat for many unique local species including the Lord Howe Woodhen, LHI Placostylus Snail, and Lord Howe Gecko.

To better understand the ecological processes that limit natural regeneration of Sallywood Swamp Forests on the Island, a project to monitor plots at Old Settlement has been undertaken. The program is funded by the NSW Government through a partnership between the Saving our Species program and the Environmental Trust.

Learnings will be implemented at a new regeneration site at North Bay (near Old Gulch) where approximately 187 Sallywoods will be replanted this winter. This will restore one of the final remnants of this vegetation community and help examine potential causes of demographic changes.