This group is focused on mobilising volunteers to attend events to get plants into the ground first and foremost.
Urban Bushland Initiative (UBI) are an exciting Melbourne based group led by a dynamic committee of six who are all under 30 years of age – united by a determination to instigate change at a local level.
Working with various local councils, UBI travel to wherever help is needed at a community planting day. They ensure the planting days are volunteer centric – with good coffee (it is Melbourne after all), food and entertainment provided for free at all events. A key element of their planting days is ensuring volunteers are local by using targeted advertising. This includes posters displayed in café’s, libraries, swimming pools, Bunnings, and various other community hubs within close vicinity to the planting site. The UBI also undertakes door-knocking to draw in the locals closest to the revegetation works, getting residents more involved in local conservation.
The Conservation Officers from Hume have run planting days for decades, however they were struggling to attract more local volunteers, so with UBI’s help they were able to bolster numbers from the usual 20 to over 80 people.
As a new group, they were kindly shown the ropes under the watchful eye of Millicent Burke, conservation officer at Moonee Valley council. Their first planting day was a hit with 20 volunteers, encouraged by the positive response, they went on to have other planting days with volunteer numbers reaching up to 150 at some events.
The group is quick to embrace technology, whether it’s a clever social media awareness campaigns to get volunteers along to planting days or using 3D printers to build a breeding hollow for the threatened powerful owl.
UBI recently supported a PhD student from Deep Design Lab from the Melbourne School of Design promote a workshop to help locals design and build some hollows using a variety of sustainable materials.
The powerful owl (Ninox strenua) is Australia’s largest species of owl that have been impacted by extensive land clearing which pushes owls into urban environments. Cities provide sufficient food but limited opportunities for nesting. Trees take 150–500 years to develop hollows large enough for an adult pair and their owlets. Without nesting hollows, powerful owls will fail to breed, and populations will continue to shrink.
These hollows were mapped to fit specific locations on larger eucalypts in Moonee Valley and with UBI’s help they were installed at one of their planting days. The cutting edge technology has made homes fit for an owl!