In case you missed it – the stories you loved in 2023

Osprey story and drought resilience podcast show positive impact in Northern and Yorke

A feel-good news story and video about returning eastern osprey birds to Yorke Peninsula helped the Northern and Yorke Landscape Board showcase the positive impact local community groups can have on our environment.

They also reached more than 93,000 people on Facebook with a post about a new episode of The Drought Resilience Podcast. It’s one of 7 podcasts that reveal honest accounts of battling consecutive years of drought in the Northern and Yorke region and the sustainable practices landholders have implemented.

Dots intrigue audiences in South Australian Arid Lands

When the SA Arid Lands Landscape Board shared a photo that looked like a series of dots on Facebook, they didn’t expect to have a reach of more than 20,000 people who were clearly interested in how improvements in technology are making it easier to track and monitor stock and impacts on grazing pressure on pastoral properties.

 See the post.

The SA Arid Lands Landscape Board was privileged to be a part of the inaugural Indigenous Ranger Gathering, which brought together Indigenous ranger groups from across the SA Arid Lands Region. The post was shared 18 times, reached 5360 people and you can see it here.

The newly released video about the event is also expected to prove popular with audiences.

Floods dominate the news in Murraylands and Riverland

The River Murray high flows in 2022 and 2023 provided a raft of stories for the Murraylands and Riverland Landscape Board.

The influx of water sparked an abundance of growth in many parts of the Riverland and a blog investigating the response to flood waters was one of their most popular pieces this year.

Flood waters also provided the conditions needed for a bold initiative to reintroduce the virtually extinct Murray crayfish into the South Australian part of the River Murray, a story that generated interest everywhere.

Bushfire recovery success and more captured on video by Landscapes Hills and Fleurieu

This heart-warming video (4:28) shows how the Landscapes Hills and Fleurieu bushfire recovery team and a range of partners worked with amazing, resilient landholders to help them their properties recover from the 2019 Cudlee Creek bushfire. This collaborative project has helped the landscape become more resilient to future extreme events. Read more.

The project was delivered by the Hills and Fleurieu Landscape Board in partnership with the Department of Primary Industries and Regions. This Local Economic Recovery project was jointly funded by the South Australian and Australian Governments under the National Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements.

Landscapes Hills and Fleurieu also produced a beautiful three-part video series to showcase project outcomes from the five-year National Landcare Program.

Learn about the fight to save the western beautiful firetail, cracking the code to save threatened orchids, and how healthy soils contribute to healthy landscapes.

Rare plant discovery on Eyre Peninsula piques interest

On Eyre Peninsula, there was plenty of interest in a rare native plant discovery with Australian broomrape (Orobanche cernua var. australiana) discovered at two locations near Whyalla during the past year. Easily confused for the broomrape weed, this native has no chlorophyll of its own and only the flowering stem can be seen above ground for a few months each year.

Eyre Peninsula’s Whyalla landscape officer collected a sample to send to botanists at the State Herbarium who were keen to confirm the host species which the landscape officer was able to do by carefully following the roots of the Orobanche to its host which turned out to be a native daisy (variable groundsel) of the Senecio lautus complex. Read more.

Celebrity gardener reel and new podcast hit the mark for Green Adelaide’s audience

On Green Adelaide’s Instagram, a collaborative reel with celebrity gardener Paul West was a popular post, achieving a reach of 11,107. The reel was part of Green Adelaide’s food gardening campaign, used as a gateway to greening – inspiring people to understand the natural world and expand that interest into their streets and beyond.

In June, Green Adelaide launched metro SA’s first environmental sector focused podcast. The show shares monthly episodes that delve into the environment people, news and projects in SA.

The podcast has had steadily increasing downloads each month, with 1,031 streams as of October, over 5 episodes.

Readers love Palya! Alinytjara Wiluṟara

Readers of the Winter 2023 issue of Palya can follow a group of school students as they find sandhill dunnarts further south than ever before, meet the new members of the Alinytjara Wiluṟara Landscape Board, and read all about the mystery rat that was busted stealing bait from warru traps in the APY Lands.

There are also great stories about a shorebird survey on the Yalata coast, collaring camels in the Great Victoria Desert, and how AW is using lasers to protect malleefowl.

Cockatoo nestlings find a toehold and students tell their side of the biodiversity story on Kangaroo Island

New, endangered glossy black-cockatoo nestlings gained an early peek at the world outside their nest boxes when the Kangaroo Island Landscape Board recovery team banded them earlier this year. This video shows how the nestlings are a welcome boost to a species trying to survive in tiny pockets of unburnt vegetation, after 2019-20 bushfires destroyed over half of their feeding habitat.

Students at the Kangaroo Island Community Education Parndana Campus recently fenced a waterlogged area in their 'Back Paddock' and planted 200 water tolerant native plants to prevent future salinity, through funding from the Kangaroo Island Landscape Board’s Grassroots Grants program and assistance from the KI Native Plant Nursery Manager Jo McPhee. Watch the students tell their story of what the work means for them and Kangaroo Island’s biodiversity in this video.

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