 Well, thanks everybody for joining us today for another HydroTerror webinar. Today's webinar is titled Leading the Way, Malone Institute's Vision for Sustainable Agriculture and Environmental Restoration. Today our presenter is Carolyn Hall. She's CEO and Managing Director of the Malone Institute. And I'm happy to say we've been working with the Malone Institute for many years now and they're a fantastic organisation. So it's great to have you here today Carolyn. Thanks Richard. Before we charge into things I would like to begin by acknowledging that we conduct our work across this great land and for that privilege we would like to thank the traditional owners. HydroTerror respectfully acknowledges the Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation where we are located today and we pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging. There's a picture of Carolyn for you. A little bit about our presenter. So Carolyn has over 20 years experience working across the agricultural and environmental sectors. Carolyn is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and a member of the Environment Institute of Australia and New Zealand. Before she was doing that I'm pretty sure Carolyn was a hydrologist. Is that right Carolyn? Ecologist really. Ecologist. For those of you who want to run institutes like the Malone Institute, Carolyn's got a strong technical background as well as management skills. Carolyn has a wealth of experience in balancing biodiversity values, habitat restoration and flood mitigation in the private sector, delivering flood risk management plans and award winning wetland management plans. Carolyn undertook a Bachelor of Science at Macquarie University and went on to undertake a master's in sustainable development. Carolyn subsequently lectured in the Graduate School of the Environment at Macquarie University. More recently her work in the rural sector has focused on delivering landscape rehydration at the property and catchment scale to assist farmers to repair their landscapes, to manage the impacts of climate change, to build productivity, restore biodiversity and enable landscapes to be more resilient, to drought, to bushfire and to flood. Carolyn builds strong relationships to collaborate and solve challenging environmental problems. She's a born optimist who believes by working together we can have a strong, productive, sustainable agriculture sector that meets the challenge of climate change and a net zero future. And I think the Malone Institute reflects Carolyn's personality. It is certainly a business with great aspirations and a lot of can-do attitudes. So really well done to you Carolyn. Before we charge into things, we love your questions and many thanks to all those early bird questions. We've got just about a record number of early bird questions to get through. But we love the questions that come out of the presentation. So use your Q&A button at the top of the screen to lodge them and we will do our best to get through them. Why does Hydrotera do these webinars? Well, we enjoy them. They provide us with the chance to share knowledge, facilitate education and provide a platform for those leading in the industry. Without further ado, I'd like to hand over to you Carolyn and thanks very much for doing this today. Thank you Richard and thank everybody for joining this webinar. It's always a joy to tell the story of the Malone Institute. And I'm grateful for the opportunity. Thank you. I too want to acknowledge the traditional owners of the places on which we work. We have a national footprint now and so we're working across the whole of Australia and we really do acknowledge that deep and ongoing connection of traditional owners across the country and we are very grateful. Thank you Richard. I just want to point out to give you a little bit of an idea of where the Malone Institute is headquartered. If you look at this map of Indigenous nations across New South Wales down there around about where the inn is located in Canberra. The Malone Institute farms are at the area of intersection of the Gundungara, the Nanawall, the Nagarago and the Ewan nations. Malone Home Farm was historically a place of gathering and of celebration. So it's really kind of nice that we're here today gathered to talk about Malone from this webinar. Thank you Richard. This is a lovely slide and this photo kind of sums it up. Richard and I became quite close during COVID sharing the highs and lows of running our organisations during that time and how challenging that was. And those of you who are in Melbourne at the time, I'm sure will really sympathise. This is a beautiful photo of us all together on the flood plain on Malone and just a great sort of reflection of the closeness of our relationship. I do want to tell you a little bit about myself so that you can understand why I've dedicated my recent life to Malone pretty much to the exclusion of almost everything else. I grew up on the North Coast in a small town called Taari in the lands of the Birapai people. It was an idyllic childhood going to the beach, going to the forest to collect firewood. And I think I kind of found my purpose and my calling then I didn't really know it, but I fell in love with the environment. As Richard said, I've studied at Macquarie University and had the opportunity, not even just to study but to lecture in the Graduate School of Environment, which was a great privilege. But after 20 years of working in the environmental field, I really had begun to despair. Nothing we were doing was working. As a country, we were leading the world in species extinction rate, particularly with small mammals. And the newest trend at the time offsetting I knew was going to do nothing to help our waterways and landscapes. As a wife and mother of two beautiful sons of a keen eye on the future. And so when I was introduced to the work of Tony Curt and the Malone Institute, I felt kind of hope for the first time in a very long time about what could be done for the environment. And it's a little bit of that hope that I want to share with you today. So thank you. Thanks Richard. I'll take you on a bit of a Malone journey, talk to you about who we are, our ambitious goals, what we do, a little bit around the challenges because they're not insignificant. I want to take you on a photo exposé of our progress across the country and finish with our sort of our vision, our broader vision. Who are we? We're not for profit. We were founded by Tony Curt in 2011. He began a really interesting guy. Some of you may be familiar with the Angus and Coot jewellery chain in the 60s, 70s and 80s in Australia. Tony began buying up land in the Southern Tablelands in the 1960s with his sister Margie. And he was deeply concerned about food and water security for Australia. He understood that we needed to repair and restore our landscapes and his incredible generosity has led to the establishment of the Institute and he bequeathed to us two farms as part of that establishment. We lost Tony in 2018 to cancer and it was a very, very sad time. But he left behind an incredible legacy. So the Malone Institute forms an umbrella over the top of two for profit entities that feed their profits back into the Institute. And one of those Malone Creek Natural Farms, which has a free range pasturized biodynamic egg enterprise producing around about 80,000 eggs a week. So that's a lot of golden eggs for those chickens to lay. And the other organization, Malone Consulting, that's a fee for service business that gives advice directly to farmers. Tony understood that we needed that financial model for the future. So in terms of collaborative, we work with lots of different organizations across Australia to deliver landscape restoration. And we've secured a financial sponsorship from Vitasoy. There they are in the top middle of the slide. And that's sort of a new era for the Institute. And we hope to replicate that with other Australian corporates. Thanks Richard. We are unashamedly ambitious and we are well on the way to meeting them. Thanks Richard. Our journey with landscape repair will have started at Malone. The pilot project, the small pilot project that Tony kicked off in 2006 at his home farm has grown into a catchment scale project called the Malone Rehydration Initiative. And this is a map. It shows stage one there. This is our major sort of Keystone project at Malone. The stats on the slide speak to the scale of that project. And importantly, it's a fully benchmark research project that will generate masses and has begun to generate masses of data as a proof of concept for landscape rehydration. And Richard and the hydratera team have been with us every step of the way. And it's this project that's formed the basis of our expansion across the country. Thanks Richard. This slide of the before and after photo at Malone Creek is really showing what Tony Coop started from a gravel desert in the 70s to a beautiful hydrated landscape full of biodiversity. In 2015 and we've now taken this small pilot project where the neighbors were initially skeptical of this rich bloke coming into their valley and possibly taking their water into a catchment scale project with incredible partnerships with those very same skeptical neighbors. And we've taken that on to other projects across the country. Thanks Richard. What do we do? We really deliver nature based solutions on the ground in partnership with First Nations communities and rural communities across Australia, but we recognize the need for change in the agricultural sector. If we're to meet things like the MLAs net zero target by 2030, if we're to grow the sector to the National Farmers Federation 100 billion dollar target by 2030 and remain competitive in international markets, then we're going to have to do things a little bit differently. Thanks Richard. And we do actually see ourselves as advocates for change. We began when I joined in 2017 as a very small team, I think I made five people, and together we're over 20 people now in 2024. As an Institute we're really focused on good governance we know how important that is. We're globally recognized by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. And at Malone, we're all about doing this work at scale. Thanks Richard. As I mentioned, the UN recognition is great and they've identified that we address three key sustainable development goals. And we really welcome that international recognition it opens, it opens a lot of doors for us and keeps us connected, both with national organizations here, but with international organizations across the world. Thank you Richard. Some of the work we do really is the results of it are all about delivering for climate change. And really what we do is work with land holders to rebuild, rehydrated and functioning landscapes that are more resilient to climate extremes. Thanks Richard. Our work acknowledges that the focus on emissions reductions has been front and center since they were flagged by Jimmy Carter's chief scientist back in 1979 as a way for the general public to understand climate change. It was easy to talk about emissions reduction. And really that's been the focus of action and funding ever since. But agricultural land use change is the other side of the ledger in adapting and mitigating climate change. And that's something we can achieve rapidly and make a major impact in. Thanks Richard. And this is underscored by this quote from the 2023 IPCC report that reminds us of the role agricultural land use has in adapting and mitigating climate change and that those methods can be ready readily scaled and deliver a raft of co benefits. And this is the place that we're interested in this is where we work. Thank you. So with landscape rehydration, we're all about restoring the way water moves, the way water is stored and the way water is cycled in the landscape. And it's explicitly for the benefit of both biodiversity and agriculture, putting those two things together. Thank you Richard. Our work acknowledges that over 200 years of changed land use in this country has really altered the way that water moves through the landscape. It's reduced vegetation across landscapes that has meant that the pace that water moves has increased dramatically. It's lowered the beds of our streams and rivers taking the water table down with those stream beds and drying out the adjacent flood plains. These dry flood plains have become very susceptible to drought. They're easier to burn. They're more vulnerable to erosion and flooding. This is at the core of what we do. We repair small water cycles on farm. Thank you Richard. Here's an example of what we do at the Maloone Institute. This is an example of landscape rehydration infrastructure as we call it now. And as defined in your South Wales legislation, we'll get to that in a little while. You might call this a flow over structure or a leaky weir or it might even be referred to as a bed control structure and in stream bed control structure. Thanks Richard. But by slowing water down, we can deliver nature based solutions and we can green up and cool down our landscapes and store water in the soil carbon sponge across the country, making not just our landscapes but our rural communities more resilient to climate change and to climate extremes. Thanks Richard. We're really delivering on nature positive. There are many facets to Maloone. We're an incredible organization, really punching well above our weight. There's the science and data side that Hydrotera have had an integral role in. There's education and capacity building, there's regulatory reform and there's technology for scale. In the science and data stakes, it really all revolves around the Maloone project. And we have an extensive integrated monitoring plan that actually Richard was a key author of. And this this plan enables the overseeing of all our data collection management. It's really taken this project from a local a local charity founders pet project into something that can be accessed by researchers across the world. There's a suite of hydrological monitoring equipment across the catchment and you can see some of the locations of that in the map here. But there's also a whole lot of biodiversity monitoring that goes alongside. Thank you Richard. We've got a science advisory committee chaired by emeritus professor Stephen Dovers from the ANU. We've got a peer review journal that you can access. We've got, as I said, this whole suite of monitoring equipment across the catchment. And we've got souls analysis that's been undertaken by students and academics at ANU and University of Canberra and Southern Cross. And we've got Hydrotera as our monitoring partner. Richard, I don't know if you want to say anything there. I think you've covered it pretty well. You might keep rolling. There's a few of it to get through. I guess just in summary, there's great groundwater data. Real time and excellent soil moisture data and climate data and string gauging. So the Malone Institute is looking for research partners that can utilize that data for their PhD studies and that sort of thing. And they're actively engaged with various universities to bring that data to life in research. So if you're in those sorts of institutes and you're looking for, you know, robust data sets, that's the purpose of that side of things. We can just get in touch and we can facilitate those data sets. So the data is all stored in what we call data stream and it allows us to access the systems and the various documents. That's just a little screenshot of the SharePoint sort of window that we use to get into that. It's been a big exercise to get the sort of quality assurance in place because there's many researchers and many people collecting data across it, but we have managed to centralize and normalize, I guess, how those various measurements are taken using, you know, written up methods. So we have data provenance, I suppose is what I'm saying there. It's been a big job, isn't it, Caroline, getting to that point. Finally, if you want to see more of the results that have actually come out of that catchment, there's a real who formally was these in charge of the Malone rehydration site presented on one of these webinars, which you can access off our website. So to see more of the actual data and the results of the monitoring to that point in time, it's worth having a look. The idea that the results show a really good story, particularly the ecological data. I think some of the needs that Malone has now is for the researchers to help us to utilize that data to interpret the story of these broader hydrology trends. We've got a paired catchment study, so it needs to be modeled in a state and transition style and the learner heading down that path. But researchers who are passionate in that area, please get in touch. Yeah, thanks, Richard, and we will be having a conference on the first and second of May at Queenby and New Canva presenting some of the results from the MII project. Thanks. So education and capacity building, this has become massive for us over the last few years and we really are developing a new discipline. A whole new curriculum for landscape rehydration that talks to landholders to engineers to regulators to professionals in the field. And our next step really is co design with First Nations people. It's just remarkable. The growth and the demand. The program really takes people on a very, very supported structured learning journey from a broad sort of introductory workshop approach through a deep dive into a boot camp that often has a practical something built at the end of the boot camp and then extends on to a mentoring program where participants actually can address a particular management issue and and build a landscape rehydration intervention on their own property focusing on something sort of small scale and low risk. But really, you know, getting something on the ground so that people can see what this means in their own environment. Regulatory reform. I'll talk on this a little bit later. But really, we're asking farmers to go through transformational change to meet the challenge of climate change. We need systemic change in our regulatory frameworks to facilitate landscape repair and rehydration. And this is the foundational work of the Malone Law Committee and what it's achieving in New South Wales. And I'll talk to this a little bit later. Technology for scale. This is very exciting. This is really Richard's brainchild, a project I think conjured up maybe during COVID, but really Richard saw us struggling with the question of how to scale and drive the uptake of this work. And he recognised that we needed to be able to guide the delivery of that scaling and the investment for that scaling. And so under his guidance and with help with funding from New South Wales DPI, we've developed the Crest tool. That's the catchment rehydration selection tool. And it's a model that uses spatial layers and indexes that have been informed by experts external to Malone. So this project very much informed by Malone, but has tapped into experts external to us to bring their knowledge to bear on this model. And it's enabled us to develop a map prioritising catchments across New South Wales for further investigation for landscape rehydration. The tool will be a public tool and it's web based and that allows for easy access and also for updating of some of the layers that lay behind the model. And it's all about, as I said, scaling and guiding investment. The map is very cool. And you can see the indices down the side. And I think we need another webinar just to focus on that, Richard. Our challenges. Yeah. I want to go through in a little bit of detail here. It won't take too long, but just a reflection on the policy settings at the international and national level. There's a little bit of a discussion about the problem and how we've gone about solving it. Thanks, Richard. So at the international level, we've got these remarkable financial reporting standards that have generated the task forces for climate related financial disclosures and nature related financial disclosures. It kind of seems really remote at the moment, but where it gets really interesting is that it's asking global corporations to report to the market on their progress on dealing with climate change and their impacts on nature. And this with the task force for climate related financial disclosures is now compulsory. And for nature related disclosures, we imagine that that will happen very soon. It's going to raise awareness significantly and drive real changes in supply chains and also demand for farm data. Thank you, Richard. But why do companies actually care? Because if they don't comply with the task forces, if they don't report their significant significant penalties for them, they basically get pinned on borrowing money on the international money market. So if you're a big multinational Coca Cola or McDonald's that wants to borrow $100 billion and you're not reporting on your task force for climate related financial disclosures, it's going to cost you money. So they're seriously incentivised and they're engaged and that's good for us. Thank you, Richard. There's also domestic drivers. So the Australian government has committed to reversing the loss of nature and the decade on ecosystem restoration that produced the nature to positive plan. And they've just recently gazetted the nature repair at Hooray for Minister Plibersek. But how do you go from that international and national policy to actually delivering projects on the ground that are going to achieve these outcomes? Well, we've got some hiccups there and at the state and territory level, but these projects whose express purpose it is to regenerate the environment. They're subject to the same planning and regulatory hurdles that projects that are designed to exploit the environment for money are subject to. So if you're going to build a marina or a housing development, you have to go through all these hoops. Our projects at the moment experience all those hoops and these are enormous economic and administrative and time burdens. Thank you, Richard. And you're not meant to be able to read this next slide, but it gives you an idea of the avalanche of legislation that has to be addressed in New South Wales to get one of these projects through. And that's at the property scale. So when you think about doing that at the catchment scale for every property, you think of 23 landholders in the Moline Rehydration Initiative, it becomes really prohibitive. Thank you, Richard. But in 2023, we had some success. We've got the Landscape Rehydration Infrastructure Guide gazetted under the Infrastructure SEP in New South Wales. Very simply, that took us from having to put a DA into council to a state level approval. So under the UPN Act in New South Wales for those of you who are familiar, a part five approving pathway. You would think that would be great, but we're rapidly discovering that, gee, we've still got some further work to do. But let's move on, Richard. What the law committee has recognised is that we need, what we're experiencing is a process driven approach. And what we need is a national code. So basically bringing all the states and territories together to agree on the outcomes that we want to achieve. And from our perspective, that's pretty simple. Functioning landscapes full of biodiversity that are productive. Obviously, it's going to look different for each state and territory. There's going to be some work there. But agreeing on the outcomes we want to achieve. And then if we have a suite of standards that we use, that we work to, then we're going to be delivering on those outcomes that we've all agreed. This can streamline and speed up that process and deliver projects under the Nature Repair Bill that currently requires biodiversity projects to have approvals at the state and territory level. We can do this national code proposal through the National Cabinet. And our law committee has actually drafted a code that we've sent off to Mr Clippersek and her office for their consideration. And we know that there is a real appetite for this. So we're interested to see where that takes us. Thank you. When you've got a national code that you're operating in a state, I thought state legislation took precedence or how does that work? At the moment it does. But what we're saying is that you could suspend that state and territory regulation. You could suspend those acts because they don't actually speak to landscape restoration projects. They're all about mitigating the impacts of projects that exploit the environment for money. So they're not fit for purpose for this kind of work. So a national code similar to the Building Code of Australia would be a much better instrument to fast track this work. I want to show you some photos now of our progress. So we feel like Tony Cook would be pretty happy with this. We've gone from this wonderful project at Malone and now we've got a national footprint. Thank you, Richard. And we're delivering this stuff. We're delivering on-ground action. We're delivering education capacity building. We're driving regulatory change. We're using technology all around the country. And here are some photos of some of the work that we're doing. This is a series of photos that show the development of a leaky gear at Malone. And just how quickly they settle into the environment. And their real reason for being is to get vegetation growing again and to get vegetation in that system that can serve to slow down the water and hold it in the landscape. Thank you, Richard. This is an example of a big broad contour bank up at Old Camondowns in Bachelor. Just about an hour south of Darwin near the entrance to Lichfield National Park. Fiona McBean and her partner Pete have worked with us to install this work and it's working a treat holding water in the landscape up there in that big seasonal rainfall. Back on the southern table lands, the Braydwood. This is a property marina, again, with a weir. You can see the rock arm lane that's gone on there. Very simple interventions, but very effective. Thank you, Richard. Further afield, this is close to all our hearts. Work at Warren-Pensini's property Parraway over at Boy Up Book in the southwest of WA. We've used contours and we've also used some simple brush matting, which we've used to slow water down on assaults gold there. Things are very different over in WA. We don't necessarily want to be reinstating and raising the water table in valley floors because of the salinity issues. So it's all about working out how our work can apply there. Thank you, Richard. Also in Central Australia, some work that we did last year, the work there has gone the full gamut from really simple contours to brushwears. This is some work with the rangers from the Central Land Council, probably around 300 clicks northwest of Alice Springs, even just simple rip lines that slow that water down, get the seeds to drop out and you end up with a lot more vegetation everywhere. Thank you, Richard. Our work doesn't happen in isolation. Land management on farm is absolutely key to getting the most benefit out of landscape rehydration works. So grazing animals are important in this regard. They keep plants in a youthful growth phase. Those young green vigorous plants can cycle carbon. They can help sequester carbon into the soil. All this can help with building soil structure and building natural capital. This work goes hand in hand with what farmers and land managers are doing on farm in terms of their land management. Thank you, Richard. Oh, our vision. So the work that we've done at Maloon has shown us that we know how to do this at the catchment scale. We know how to engage landholders. We know how to build a community of practice. We know how to design and implement landscape rehydration at the catchment scale. The Crest tool gives us the technology that we need to see how we can scale that work and prioritize the delivery of that work across New South Wales. We know that Crest can be scaled up to be a national tool. We want to deliver this work across the entire country. We're delivering on the building blocks that we needed. We've got the technical rigour around the design process that we know that can be repeated anywhere. We've got landscape rehydration infrastructure recognised in legislation in New South Wales. And we've got examples of this approach across the country. Thank you, Richard. We know the integrated benefits of landscape rehydration to our environment and our communities. And we know that this approach can be part of a restoration economy to help heal country and engage not just rural communities but First Nations peoples as well. Thank you, Richard. We can green up, as I said, green up and cool down landscapes across the entire country, putting our farmers and First Nations people at the centre of our response to climate change. We can catch water and restore land across Australia. That's a story of hope, folks. Fantastic story, Caroline. Thank you. Happy to take some questions. Before we move to the questions. So you talk about the new mandatory reporting earlier and you said it's good news for Malone. Why is it good news for Malone? It's good news because large corporations are going to be looking at ways that they can report positively against these task forces. So they're going to have to make changes. And farmers are going to have to be at the centre of those changes within supply chains. And so that means doing things a little bit differently on farm so that you're going to not just reduce your emissions but you're going to have a positive impact on nature. And that's the work that we do. That's where we deliver. We know exactly how to do that and these on-ground works can help farmers actually take action to deliver so that the supply chains that they are within can happily report against these task forces and get their ticks. So do you think that those large corporates will help fund these works in order to secure their supply chain? Or how do you say that? That's the dream. We know that in the US and the EU that this is happening now and that large volumes of money are looking for a home, particularly in the EU. We've recently seen 400,000 euros raised without even a project to focus on. So we know that the money is out there. The thing that we're missing in Australia is the connection piece to crack that nut so that we have that connector piece between that international money and projects on the ground in Australia. And for a long time here, that's looked like carbon credits. But we need to go beyond that now with the nature task force and look at nature-positive projects as well. So it's going to be in that setting so that that money can come here and is already looking for a home in Australia. And we know that our unique opportunity with broad-scale agriculture in Australia presents a really unique opportunity for farmers to deliver their own nature-positive projects. So it's great and we wish it would hurry up. All right, over to the questions. And thanks everyone for sending those in. What thing 14 to get through before we get to your questions. Number one, do you have data on groundwater levels flanking the creeks where you have been promoting bank infiltration? I could probably answer that one, Caroline. Yes, we have extensive piezometer transects that start near stream and go further across these flood plains. They're monitoring a complex geology actually because it's hydrogeology. You've got discontinuous prior streams really. So they've been laid down over thousands and thousands of years. So getting a meaningful long-term, I guess, average groundwater level across a discontinuous formation like that is quite challenging. So they've had to put in a really comprehensive monitoring network to achieve that. So it's all got continuous pressure transducer data from those groundwater as well as some conductivity data and other field parameters. It's a really robust data set. Question number two, cows generally help sequester CO2 if allowed to graze. They help grow new shoots which absorb CO2, traditional methods. I can't say the last bit. Yeah, I can make a comment there. Yes, agreed. Grazing animals in systems are really important in terms of sequestering carbon into the soil. We'd like to see that in rotational or time-controlled grazing, that kind of keeping lots of plants in that useful growth phase. But when we think about landscape rehydration and increasing soil moisture or plant available water over space and time, the opportunity there is to even out the extremes that come from extremes of rainfall and so creating the conditions to sequester carbon and hold it in the soil and evening out some of the extremes of climate to ensure consistent sequestration of carbon. Alright, question number three. Given your extensive experience in delivering landscape rehydration projects, could you elaborate on some innovative technologies? I think you've seen some of those in the presentation today, some of the landscape rehydration infrastructure that we use. But what I would say there is that these projects at the landscape scale are social projects as much as landscape rehydration infrastructure or natural infrastructure projects. So you really need to have both of those elements of a project firing concurrently. So you've got to bring the community along. You've got to bring those landholders in the catchment along. You've got to bring those stakeholders along as well as have that technical rigour around the interventions that you're going to actually use. Number four, are there any practical and proven regenerative best practices SOPs for Victoria or are we at research trial and error stage? I'll suggest we've gone well beyond trial and error stage with Regen Ag I would point people to Regen Ag practice looks different with every enterprise on every farm for every landholder. So it's really a set of principles. You're looking after your soil health, you're addressing climate change, you're enhancing biodiversity, you're improving water quality, you're working with nature. And so what that actually translates to in practice can look quite different in different places. But there's a recent SLN white paper on investing in Regen Ag, reflections from the past decade that's lurking around on the internet. It's dated February 2024. So I'd point people to that paper to have a look at some of those. Question number five, how to ensure the variety of geomorphic character is preserved in reconstructed river landscapes? Well, I think that's kind of what it's all about, isn't it? Sometimes we can't take a system back to exactly what it was. The erosion might have gone too far, but with the use of landscape rehydration infrastructure, we're really trying to reinstate that pond riffle sequence in the creek, reinstate those in-stream wetlands, get those small rainfall events, those what flood engineers would call nuisance events back out onto the flood plain, get those flood runners working. So we're really reintroducing complexity into the system. And so I think in terms of geomorphic character, we're working with geomorphology and the features that are already there and trying to get those processes happening again within those reconstructed landscapes. Now, some people like the way they look now, Carolyn, right? And you're putting them back to the way they used to. It's not going to be possible to preserve both, is it? I guess there's change there, right? Number six, the role of local government is supporting sustainable urban agriculture in supporting... Yeah, look, I would say local government can have a huge influence by bringing organisations like us into your local government area by opening up what your rural landscapes planning looks like and what those kind of policies can foster and incentivising landholders and helping landholders learn. I mean, this is a big ask of farmers to change their practices and to change the way they manage their landscapes and so helping them along. And the same applies, I think, for sustainable urban agriculture, helping people learn about what they can do. All right. So a role for local government for sure. Is there also a role for local government to be actively involved in your push to change the regulations or is that more sorted at the state? It's probably more at the state and the above level, but I think local government through acknowledging the value that this work brings can have a positive influence, sure. Okay. The next question is sustainable water management. That's what we're all about. Yeah. Maybe I can talk to that a little bit. If you think about this in a context of catchment hydrology, really the leaky structures that are put in place are retaining more moisture in the catchments and that moisture is cycled for longer within those catchments so you get beneficial local climatic conditions as Phil Mulvey spoken previously about the small water hydrologic cycle while it really is at that catchment and subcatchment scale. So retaining water in catchments does work. It's well proven to work. It also has benefits around water quality. A lot of these structures actually really do improve the water quality as excellent data on that. So once again, a sustainable approach. Sometimes people get concerned about that there's not enough water for downstream but these systems reach an equilibrium over time and what happens is you get bank storage or storage in the flood plains which creates more robust base flows during dry periods than you had before. So your base flow is really from delayed sources of water coming into these systems. If you've rehydrated those systems, there's more water and you get better long-term water down the stream as a whole. So in a way, you're regulating the water better because you've got less rushing down in flood events, more retained in the system so that water is spread out over a longer period of time. Has that same thoroughly reasonable? All right, next question. What can you do with compacted soils? Yeah, well, a number of different practices there, I guess. You can introduce plants with big long temperates that can try and break up some of that compaction. You can reduce the source of that compaction if it's grazing animals. You can use rotational grazing. It's really, that's a pretty site-specific question to answer. So it really would depend on the context and what you're trying to achieve. But yeah, there's a variety of opportunities to deal with compacted soils, introducing increased organic matter, all sorts of things. It's also a bit about the moisture itself. So the more moist your soil profile, the more bacterial activity you get. And with that, you get a constant improvement in organic matter in there, which leads to a lower level of compaction ultimately. Question number nine. What are the differences in approach between restoration practices focused on sustainable agriculture versus conservation? This is a great question. And this is what it's all about from a learn really. In Australia, I think for a long time, there's been a separation around nature conservation and agriculture and that those two things, it would be really difficult for them to coexist. Nature conservation has belonged in a national park. I think we take a much more international view of this, that you can have sustainable use of the environment and you can still achieve conservation outcomes. And we're seeing this on farm. So restoring the function of these landscapes and restoring the riparian areas and the function of those areas, holding water in the system for longer, restoring those wetlands in the stream, those areas, the management changes from an agricultural point of view of those areas, they're managed differently because you're putting the water back into them. But having areas that have strong conservation values on farm alongside and even as part of productive agricultural land, that's what it's all about. We've got over 55% of our country under agriculture. So to reach those biodiversity targets that we've signed up to internationally, we absolutely have to have ag and environment working together to deliver those outcomes. And it's this kind of work with productive agricultural land that has these pockets of high-value habitat within them that is going to, I think, enable that to happen. Do you think the current level of understanding of how to measure these beneficial changes is a barrier to that moving forward or do you think we've got there? I think we've still got work to do and I think the Nature Repair Bill and the call for biodiversity projects is going to trigger a whole new era of how we measure biodiversity and how we report on those gains and how we do that in a cost-effective way. So, you know, somewhere somebody pays and so a biodiversity credit is not going to have, you know, it's not going to... The value of that biodiversity credit cannot be so valuable with having so much biodiversity monitoring that it becomes unaffordable. We have to find that kind of middle ground and I think there's some remarkable technology coming into the space, some of the work that is happening with drones and satellites and those sort of things that can be complemented by on-ground assessment is, you know, we're going to see some real advances there. It is interesting looking at the work we've been doing with yourselves that in the end that long-term satellite data which goes all the way back to the mid-1970s is such a powerful data set for looking at the long-term change versus, you know, all this high-resolution sensing we're doing to sort of ground truth but in the end at the sort of time span you're looking at for change the satellite data seems really important, doesn't it? It does. And I think if we're talking about valuing landscape scale restoration projects then and generating some kind of or making the values of those projects fungible, love that word, making them worth money then, you know, the time frames get longer suddenly you can plan for longer time frames because there's going to be value, you know, there's a recognised value in what you're delivering the outcomes of what you're delivering. So it's just a really interesting space and I think it's going to move really quickly in the next few years. All right, we better keep moving with these questions. Is there a key reference we can use when preparing landscape specifications or does every site require a site-specific design? Yeah, look, I would in that way encourage you to come along to a boot camp and learn the tricks of the trade but inevitably when you're going to build something in a location that and you're going to try and manage water then you're going to want to have a site-specific design but in terms of small-scale low risk interventions there are lots of kind of general rules that you can follow when you understand a little bit more about how water moves through the long-scape. A biochar fan here. What role can biochar play in increasing the water holding capacity of the soil in the face of drought and climate change? Yeah, look, I think it can make a contribution. It's going to introduce organic matter and increase, probably combined with management activities increase the health of the soil and so through those combined processes you're going to have increased water holding capacity. There's not one silver bullet. There's not one action or one ameliorant that can be applied that can fix everything. It's inevitably going to be a combination of factors that lead to better outcomes and I think biochar has a role to play. Can these practices be applied on a 1-2 acre allotment? Of course they can. Why not? These interventions can go from the very micro-scale. You can see these patterns of the way water moves through the landscape from the very small-scale to the large-scale. Clearly when we think about restoring landscape function our preferred unit is the watershed or the catchment but there is no reason that you can't apply some of these techniques at a smaller property scale and we do that regularly. Just looking at the MRI site your actual scale of measurement is based on a leaky wear. So just to this, can you make a change at a 1-2? Absolutely and you really change the ecology at that scale so whilst it's got some broader impacts you do make a difference even at a small scale. Number 13, what are some great examples of landscape rehydration projects in Western Australia and how are they funded? Yeah well that work that I showed you from Parallway in Boy Up Brook is an example of some of the work that we've done there. We're also working with Stuart McAlpine with a couple of other landholders in the south-west of WA and in the Wheatbelt-Moresk Institute as well over there. At the moment the majority of that funding has come by grants. We can only hope that we might see some expansion and some interest from others but at the moment there are examples in WA primarily grant funded, the ones that we're aware of and the ones that we've worked on and if not grants then sort of privately funded or possibly through, they may increasingly be through natural capital market credits so things like carbon credits or when the nature repair market bill really gets active through biodiversity. How far off are we on that happening do you think? Well the bill has been, is that it? It was passed in November but there is still sort of Nature Finance Council I think that Ken Henry is sharing up is all about how do you bring the money to the nature repair market, the nature repair bill. So I think there's some work to do around getting the first biodiversity project up but it's definitely, Plybysek has set the same. So that's when I mentioned before about having those connectors to that international money the nature repair bill is a framework for that so if we can get the state and territory regs out of the way that could be a real pathway forward. Okay number 14, how to implement landscape-wide rehydration? Yeah, come and have a look at the MRI come and have a look at the Moline Rehydration Initiative it's a catchment scale model that can be replicated and scaled up and delivered across this country so the project is a social project it's participatory it's based on the landholders participating in that project that's a critical piece of the puzzle and it can't be ignored and it's combined with really good science really good monitoring and really strong technical delivery of these interventions so yeah we've got a bit of a model for that and I encourage you come and have a look get in touch come to the conference on the 1st and 2nd of May get in touch if you're a researcher and you want to have a look at our data and we're always open to philanthropic and corporate partners to help us scale and deliver more of this work. Excellent, well Carolyn we're out of time thank you very much to everybody who sent in those early bird questions I'd really just like to say keep up the good work Carolyn and if you want to get in touch what's the best way for them to get in touch? Just go to your website Yeah go to the website there's an info email there I really just have to give a shout out to the team which our whole team at the Moline Institute and across Moline Consulting are just remarkable and I get to do the work that I can do because of the strength of that team so I just want to give a shout out I know there's some of them on the webinar today thank you Good on you team Alright thanks very much Carolyn Thanks Richard Thanks for joining us today everybody