Disentangling chronic regeneration failure in endangered woodland ecosystems

Abstract

Ecological restoration of degraded ecosystems requires the facilitation of natural regeneration by plants, often augmented by large-scale active revegetation. The success of such projects is highly variable. Risk factors may be readily identifiable in a general sense, but it is rarely clear how they play out individually, or in combination. We addressed this problem with a field experiment on the survival of, and browsing damage to, 1275 hand-planted buloke (Allocasuarina luehmannii) seedlings in a nationally endangered, semi-arid woodland community. Buloke seedlings were planted in 17 sites representing four landscape contexts and with three levels of protection from kangaroo and lagomorph ..