ReWild
ReWild Perth is an initiative to 'Bring Nature Home' and encourage people to provide native habitat in their gardens, courtyards or balconies.
ReWild was Launched on January 10th 2022
Start ReWilding your garden now.
What is ReWild?
One of the basic facts about modern life is that wherever people settle, we displace the pre-existing environment. In places like Perth, which is particularly prone to ‘urban sprawl’, this means that we’ve been displacing wildlife and removing habitat for most of our history since European settlement. In recent decades, we’ve made big strides in the implementation of water-sensitive urban design and the need for public green spaces, but we still face the problem of urban fragmentation.
When development occurs, there is the immediate and obvious loss of habitat and wildlife. However, many people may not be aware there is a second wave of biodiversity loss which occurs as species are prevented from being able to move freely across the landscape to avoid threatening processes. This loss of freedom of movement is called ‘fragmentation’.
Luke McMillan, Perth NRM (2019)
The ReWild project seeks to mitigate this problem by increasing (or introducing) native habitat into private residences, which is a primary landuse throughout the region.
Many agencies are now looking at creating ‘stepping stones’ or ‘green corridors’ to allow native wildlife to move between major remnant habitats, but this requires a lot of land, and is extremely difficult to retrofit into existing suburbs.Perth NRM believes that households and businesses can significantly assist native wildlife by creating little pockets of habitat throughout the suburbs.
We call this approach ‘urban permeability’.
The ReWild web resource
Perth NRM has been working in partnership with Birdlife WA — with funding from Lotterywest — to develop an innovative web resource to help people plan, create and record native gardens specifically tailored to their living space.
The ReWild website will provide a wide range of resources and provide recommendations for your area (within the Perth NRM region), specifying soil type and what kind of wildlife you’ll be supporting.
Participants who choose to record their ReWild projects will be able to share their progress and create anonymous pins on the ReWild map showing their influence. Over time, this map will show our collective efforts and we’ll be able to see the increased environmental connectivity throughout the region.
This is an exciting project that we’ve been working very hard with developers at Clever Starfish and we already have more than 150 people pre-registered to participate in the beta testing in the coming months.
Start ReWilding your garden now.
Partners
We acknowledge and appreciate the support of all our partners, supporters, funding bodies and sponsors.
