University of Queensland experts have been awarded more than $1.8 million funding and in-kind support to discover ways of rehabilitating degraded forests in Vietnam.
The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) will provide almost $940,000 over four years for the project, entitled Mixed species plantations of high value trees for timber production and community services.
“We will provide intellectual support on how to restore the country’s forests thereby restoring some of the original biodiversity and ecological services while also helping to overcome rural poverty on a large scale,” said grant co-winner Dr David Lamb from UQ’s School of Life Sciences and Cooperative Research Centre for Tropical Rainforest Ecology and Management (the Rainforest CRC).
In addition to Dr Lamb, the group comprises: Dr Peter Erskine from the School of Life Sciences and the Rainforest CRC; Dr Sharon Brown from the School of Life Sciences; and Associate Professor Steve Harrison from the School of Economics and the Rainforest CRC.
“The Vietnamese government hopes to plant five million hectares over the next 10 years which is a huge undertaking considering Australia’s total reforestation plantations encompass just over one million hectares after 50 years of planting,” Dr Lamb said.
“Vietnam’s forests have been heavily depleted over the past 50 years. Eucalypts were used to reforest some of the more badly degraded areas but, in recent years, the price received by farmers for eucalypt timber has been dropping in value due to an oversupply in the 1980s and 90s.
“This time they will use a mixture of higher value native species to provide benefits such as timber, fruit, gums, resin and traditional medicines, as well as to help restore biodiversity and protect watersheds.”
Dr Lamb said the group’s advice would focus on how to grow trees in mixed or multi-species plantations unlike most reforestation schemes where plantations were established as monocultures.
“We need to create a type of insurance policy for the poor, individual rural farmers who will undertake much of the future planting throughout Vietnam after being given land rights by the Vietnamese government over the past few years,” he said.
“By finding the right mix of native species to form a stable environment, we should ensure Vietnam the best possible economic and environmental outcome in the future.”
The Queensland Government will provide in-kind support to the project via the Queensland Forestry Research Institute (QFRI).
For the past 12 years Dr Lamb has been working with various UQ and Rainforest CRC researchers on forest rehabilitation in north Queensland and with Greening Australia on a farm forestry project at Mt Mee, approximately one-and-a-half hours north-west of Brisbane.
They have planted more than 16 native Australian species at the Mt Mee site to ascertain what combination of species provides the best growth-rate for cultivation, yet still allows adequate grass coverage for grazing dairy cattle.
Media: For further information, contact Dr Erskine (telephone 07 3365 1767) or Joanne van Zeeland at UQ Communications (telephone 07 3365 2619 or email: communications@uq.edu.au).
