Current and Future Activities

We want to bring the relict Gondwanan species of Tasmania's alpine forests into the backyards of suburban Hobart! By engaging the community with these rare and special plants, we can broaden awareness of their plight and create a fire safe genetic bank of plants for future reforestation efforts.

The genetic diversity of Nothofagus gunnii is poorly understood. We want to conduct a study to investigate the genetic diversity of this species both within and between populations, so we can better understand how the capacity of the species to evolve to withstand increasing temperature and altered fire regimes associated with climate change.

One of our big goals is to get more relict species into people's back yards. However, many of Tasmania's relict species can be tricky to grow in a suburban setting. That's why we want to find and develop cultivars of these fantastic plants that are better suited to grow outside of their mountain homes.

An ambitious project that we want to work towards is a living biobank of every alpine relict ecosystem in Tasmania. We want to have a sample populations grown in a firesafe location from every crucial bioregion so that in the case of fire, drought, heat, or other disturbance, we can act fast and have the area replanted before the ecosystem is lost forever.

Using historical records and past climate data, we want to identify where these relict forests used to be before European settlement brought changes in fire regime and deforestation. We then want to use current climate data with future projections to assess opportunities for re and aforestation in the Tasmanian highlands.

We want to bring the relict forests into classrooms all over the state of Tasmania. Not only do we want to deliver education about the plight of these threatened ecosystems, we want to bring the trees themselves to the youth of the state. By engaging the youth of Tasmania, we aim to cultivate a sense of custodianship over these forests in the next generation.