TRANSCRIPT
Boarding a light plane from the Tasmanian mainland, it's an unusual commute to work for palawa man, Andry Sculthorpe.
He's part of an ecosystem restoration project on a remote 8000 hectare island in the Bass Strait.
This is lungtalanana; it was part of the country of our ancestors but two hundred years ago when white people started to come to these islands they really took a lot away from these places, so there was lots of exploitation of whales, seals, they set up farming on the islands, the islands are small and those small island ecosystems are also quite fragile.
The island was returned to Aboriginal ownership in 2005 and is managed by the pakana ((PAH-KAH-NA))rangers.
But the team inherited a severely degraded landscape - ravaged by weeds and bushfires.
Together with the World Wildlife Fund, the rangers are working to restore this ecosystem to its former glory, conducting frequent cool burns, an Aboriginal land management practice that encourages greater biodiversity.
By putting fire gently through these landscapes in patches, burning these grasses, that's allowing those grasses to flourish and stopping that overstory of these scrubs of sheoak and teatree scrub from fully inundating these areas.
As the environment starts to flourish, the rangers want to repatriate lost species, starting with the wombat.
Animals are a part of the way in which life is balanced out. The activities of wombats with their digging and their burrowing puts nutrients back into the soil, creates microhabitats for plants to grow, and also provides other small animals refuge in those burrows.
But before lost wildlife can be reintroduced to the island, one of the main challenges facing the rangers is the need to eradicate feral cats.
We believe once we can do that, that sets up this place as a wonderful benchmark for how this landscape can be restored.
The restoration of land and sea habitats invites natural processes to rebound
And enhances the biosphere's carbon cycle.
For this reason, the team are also monitoring the sea grass beds around the island.
Fiona Maher is a senior women's Sea Country ranger with the pakana rangers.
They are huge carbon soaks, so they would hold more carbon than a rainforest holds. To me healthy ecosystems for me, is healthy people.
First Nations knowledge is leading this project, showing how to care for the land, with cultural values at the forefront.
This is pakana ranger Mat Wheatley.
We are custodians of this land, it's important for us to keep the ecology of this place running at a smooth level, so we can try and get the Country back to the way it was.
In comparison to the rest of the world, Australia has one of the worst animal extinction records, but some say Tasmania could hold the key to restoring ecosystems.
Rob Brewster is the rewilding program manager with the World Wildlife Fund Australia.
Tasmania has only lost one mammal species, the Thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger, and that was due to hunting. We've lost about 35 mammal species up on the mainland. We know that foxes play a huge role in mammal declines and extinction, so keeping foxes out of Tasmania is really key to that island keeping its biodiversity integrity.
Around the world, there have been various successful efforts to rewild ecosystems.
In the UK, the reintroduction of beavers has decreased the effects of floods in certain waterways due to their dam building capability.
In Africa, the restoration of blue wildebeest populations in the Serengeti has helped the ecosystem move from being a carbon source to a carbon sink.
Australia has various initiatives of its own, including reintroducing the platypus to the Royal National Park near Sydney.
The Tasmanian Land Conservancy has various programs aiming to bolster eastern quolls populations in Tasmania - while other initiatives are underway to try to reintroduce them to the mainland where they have been extinct since the 1960s.
David Hamilton is a conservation ecologist with the Tasmanian Land Conservancy.
Eastern quolls are super important to the ecosystem that they're in, they are mesopredators, which is one step below your top level predator like your Tasmanian devil or dingo, they're predating smaller species in the landscape, which mean they're regulating things all the way down the system.
A breeding program is underway to help eastern quolls repopulate their ecosystem niche.
Doctor Hamilton says healthy ecosystems can help to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Healthy ecosystems are more resilient in some ways to change as well,the more thriving populations they have going all the way through them the more buffered they can be against some of the greater impacts we are having.
