Restoring Australia's vast green corridors

A peak environment organisation is urging private land managers across the southern tablelands of New South Wales and the ACT to sign up to a tree corridor restoration program.

Greening Australia has been working with local landholders to regenerate their land for the past 17 years.

The organisation's capital regional initiative chief executive Jason Cummings says regeneration efforts are already evident across large parts of the ACT and southern tablelands.

"People will fly into Canberra and see big new patches of native vegetation in the landscape," he said.

"They will piece by piece see the recovery of our landscapes on the southern tablelands.

"Our vision is that the future won't be bare areas in the landscape but it will actually be treed back to woodland like it once was."

More than 50 private land holders across the ACT and southern NSW have been taking part in a program to re-introduce grassy box gum woodlands.

The initiative includes Canberra's Mulligans Flat Sanctuary, private land adjoining the sanctuary and the Murrumbidgee River catchment.

Mr Cummings says more than 95 per cent of grassy box gum woodlands have been cleared across south eastern Australia, allowing invasive weeds such as African Lovegrass to flourish in some areas.

"What we are actually doing is starting to put back a nationally threatened ecosystem," he said.

"To promote connectivity in the landscape so that birds and other animals have the ability to move around the landscape as the climate changes."

As part of the initiative, land managers are paid to remove grazing livestock from paddocks larger than 20 hectares while native trees and shrubs establish.

Mr Cummings says eligible land managers across a range of land tenures are paid $50 per hectare for five years to exclude livestock.

"That then allows stock to be reintroduced on a rotational grazing basis," he said.

Landholders to the north and south of Canberra are being encouraged to sign up to the program which is funded by the Federal Government's $946 million biodiversity fund.

Today, Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke is visiting Canberra's Mulligan's Flat Woodland Sanctuary for the first time.

"This is very special," he said.

"We are leading the way in the country developing these progressive restoration programs that bring agricultural productivity and biodiversity conservation together.

"This model has been picked up in southern Western Australia and this is the most cost effective way of restoring landscapes at scale."