National Volunteer Week Central Highlands Water Tree Guard Removal Project
Gong Gong, Victoria

CELEBRATING NATIONAL VOLUNTEER WEEK!

Central Highlands Water & CVA Protecting Ballarat's Water Catchment Areas

Come and join your Conservation Volunteers team on National Volunteer Week as we venture into a new project partnership with Central Highlands Water located in Central Victoria between Daylesford and Ballarat.

Central Highlands Water manages domestic water reserves that supply domestic water to Ballarat and its surrounds. The people at Central Highlands Water (CHW) are committed to protecting, enhancing and restoring biodiversity on all land and assets they manage.

Conservation Volunteers Australia would like to assist CHW by maintaining and improving their revegetation areas that have been establishing over the past few years for the purposes of protecting source water catchment areas, improving and enhancing water quality within these catchments and to contribute to increasing biodiversity around the region by creating new habitat areas and by linking and increasing existing remnant vegetation patches in the surrounding landscape.

The task is for CVA is to remove the plastic tree guards from the thousands of young, establishing trees and shrubs, bag-up and seal the guards inside large woolpacks and store the full woolpacks in a safe and secure area to ensure the guards will not disintegrate, tear away from the establishing revegetation areas and blow around the landscape contaminating habitat areas and the precious water resources.

While we are there we will be on the lookout for any pine-tree seedlings that may be starting to regrow in the native revegetation plots, and if we see any we will cut them out with loppers and/or secateurs before they grow into large trees and potentially smother the newly establishing indigenous revegetation.

If you enjoy wandering about in undulating terrain and open landscapes, chatting with like-minded and outdoorsy people, having fun in a team environment while developing new skills within the environmental conservation industry, and learning about how a statutory water management organisation plans and manages one of our essential life-giving resources, then why not call Meigan at the CVA Bendigo office on 5444 0777 or try the mobile 0475 972 354 or you could send an email to mwaayers@cva.org.au.