Susan Lawrence

So it's probably 150,000 hectares.

Okay, so we've had a long history of deforestation in the region that started with logging in the 1890s and then that led on to an expansion of agriculture for dairy predominantly and other kind of crops.

And that's really focused on the flatlands and on the very good agricultural soils.

So we've lost a part of what could have been the most productive part of that ecosystem.

North of the Daintree River, there hasn't been a lot of deforestation, but predominantly we're focusing on some in the Daintree, but also in the uplands and lowlands to the south.

Ah, well, we've had restoration here for 40 years and it hasn't been done at scale.

And so it's been really targeting critical areas for wildlife corridors.

And it's been done with very high diversity plantings and a lot of volunteer effort.

But we haven't really attempted to do anything at scale yet.

Oh, yes.

I think birds are probably the first, the leading species.

movers of seed across the landscape and so they're the birds they're the ones that are really attracted by the plantings so the rest of the science behind the restoration is to try to plant trees that fruit very early that are very attracted to frugivores because what you might not know is that most rainforest seeds are vertebrate dispersed they're not wind dispersed so you need vertebrates to be moving those seeds across the landscape

Oh, yes.

And I should have answered your question about cassowaries.

In Asia and in South America, you might be looking for monkeys predominantly to disperse.

Here we've got cassowaries.

We've got spectacle flying foxes.

And some of the work from CSIRO shows that spectacle flying foxes may move 25 kilometres in a night.

So there's a very big opportunity for them to move seeds around the landscape.

30 years ago, I had my dream job of being a park ranger and I got involved then in planting the first wildlife corridors in rainforest in Australia.