Biolinks Alliance Local to Landscape

Local to Landscape is the only ecological approach in Central Victoria that brings the critical need of our native plants and animals together with the communities best-placed to protect them – for genuine and lasting environmental change.

This planning system - created by Biolinks Alliance - brings together community members to agree on and foster large-scale landscape restoration actions in their local area.

Backed by Biolinks Alliance’s expertise and leadership - together, community members (such as landholders and community environmental groups) in consultation with government and Traditional Owners, create a plan and ecological investment prospectus for their local area.

A Local to Landscape plan and prospectus can include innovative pilot projects, online science based resources, education, and consultancy that helps build the capacity, skills and knowledge of volunteers and community environmental groups - empowering them to take ownership and lead large-scale landscape restoration.

See how we are bringing this approach to life in our Heathcote Local to Landscape.

A shared community vision to restore and reconnect landscapes

With roots that stretch far and wide - our communities offer strong, interwoven foundations, just like the ancient trees around them.

Traditional Owners, farmers, landholders, environmental groups and volunteer organisations are the ecosystem stewards who know these landscapes better than anyone.

And - yet, decisions made far away and applied locally without adequate engagement or a genuine understanding of a community’s own vision, fail to make the most of this incredible knowledge.

Local to Landscape is an approach that is reconnecting landscapes that are at dire threat with our changing climate. This is not just with corridors and linear connections - but by rebuilding biolinks using evidence based, scientific methods that enable native species to move through landscapes - regardless of tenure, land type or land use. 

Building communities around larger-scale landscape issues

Through our Local to Landscape approach - Biolinks Alliance builds communities around large landscape-scale issues.

We establish trust and rapport with local communities and bring their knowledge and experience together with philanthropy, the latest science and networks that governments structures offer in state or national projects - but which are so often missing at the local level.

We also understand the variety of land uses in which our work is embedded - and, importantly, we know that conservation and farming go hand-in-hand.

The result is genuine and lasting change, with a return of ecological function and resilience to our landscapes – which support a diversity of land uses that make our region a vibrant place.

For the creatures of Central Victoria this means - soils that absorb rainfall, mid-story shrubs that offer woodland birds shelter as they hunt for insects, rivers that offer clean, reliable water flow for platypus to dive and forage, and healthy banksia and wattle where sugar gliders leap as they pass through, liberated from the impacts of human boundaries. 

Across the plains, ranges and valleys of Central Victoria - our Local to Landscape approach is at work developing projects that create these outcomes. We collaborate with passionate locals to plan new, innovative projects that not only create brighter futures for our creatures, but test new theories and lead to larger-scale landscape projects.