Landscape Restoration

Connecting Country
Restoring landscapes across the Mount Alexander region

Connecting Country is a project that aims to link up people, communities and the landscape. It involves a group of around 20 community and agency representatives who come together to plan linkages across this landscape in Central Victoria, focussing on natural regeneration.

Connecting Country became an incorporated body in 2009.

The team has produced a Biodiversity Blueprint showing the environmental assets across the region. Rather than being a static document, it incorporates a website and uses the community web mapping portal produced by geo-spatial company, Spatial Vision. This technology allows the community to communicate with each other about conservation efforts on private land. It also allows the project team to collect and collate information about species like the Brush-tailed Phascogale on private land to help in writing federal government funding applications.

Our grants have employed Project Workers, funded planning and information workshops, produced a hardcopy blueprint, and produced an interactive website. Other small grants, both from us and private donors, are funding the Castlemaine Field Naturalists to produce a Swift Parrot DVD and an indigenous flora guide - both to be used as educational tools within the Connecting Country project.

Connecting Country was successful in receiving CfoC funding from the Federal Government and is now concentrating on delivering outcomes based around preservation of Yellow-box Woodland communities and the Brush-tailed Phascogale.

This is our 'model' project and their development has been followed very closely by Executive Officer, Beth Mellick, who has participated in the Reference Group and a variety of other workshops. Beth has produced a checklist document, based on Connecting Country, to be used by all the landscape restoration projects that we support and that we offer to support into the future. Click here to see that document.

Please email Beth for a copy of Connecting Country's blueprint document in hard form. Go to Connecting Country's website for an on-line copy, and for all other information about their project.

See www.connectingcountry.org.au