I took this picture at Deniliquin on the banks of the Edward River just this afternoon. The Edward is an anabranch of the Murray River and very much part of the Riverina.
There is a perception that most red gums in this region are dead – well that’s according to newspapers like The Age – but they are not.
They are beautiful trees.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
They must have been playing hide & seek with our researcher mates.
They disguised them self’s as salt.
Hasbeen
Jen: What was the general appearance of the wider area.
General view from your photo seems that trees are all old and no new recruitment.
Ground/pasture looks a bit degraded – but maybe a road or cattle track? Is the bank grazed? What’s their rainfall been like of late?
Phil
Around here aboriginal management was to cull what was considered excess regeneration of woody vegetation along streams. A fair flip from this to untouchable woody vegetation along streamlines
And this is still going on in the current day? When do new Red Gums appear?
Jennifer; can you post in this thread or email more photos?
Although this picture is quite good I can’t walk around in it enough to confirm my suspicion these trees are all one age group. Neither can I tell if the channel was excavated and the banks raised some time ago.
Sorry.
Regrowth usually ocurrs after felling or clearing and takes the form of dense stands of saplings, mature trees tend to discourage competition. The same can be found in forest red gum. These dense stands of saplings should be thinned to produce decent sized trees.
River red gums germinate profusely on flooding, and can die back due to long periods of flood. River regulation has actually increased the area of red gum in the Barmah-Millewa Forest.
River red gums are host to a fungus that can cause a fatal disease similar to meningitis and I did hear that this was also found in E terreticornis (forest red) and E blakelyana (blakely’s gum)
Now how can you be such a right wing b and know useful stuff like that?
There you go again Phil, always turning the political screw.
For your information I am neither right nor left wing, these are malaproprisms that more properly belong to some now defunct cafe on Boulevarde San Michele (now a couscous restaurant).
I believe in government deregulation and private property title. Those that believe that strong govts are better keepers of the public should consider the Chinese/Russian proposal for floating nuclear power stations and remember the Cold War, Gulags, Cultural Revolution, the Lada and the Zil.
Comes complete with desal, who said that communists were stupid?
http://www.nuclear.com/n-plants/index-Floating_N-plants.html
rog is there an economic view/leader/model that most closely resembles yr political & economic ideal? I ask out of genuine interest because sometimes you speak as though you want zero govt absolute unrestrained mkts but I can imagine that’s quite so. What would you do to conserve, say, vulnerable birds ie suitable habitat, range, monitoring etc? If you envisage a property rights arrangement for conservation how it would be co-ordinated, monitored and managed?
Careful Rog – you’re lightening up. I’m politically neutral but ideologically dodgy. So given you dropped out of school how did you end up knowing stuff and what are you doing here?
correction: ‘can’t imagine..’
rog: you have still not addressed our doubts about trees depicted in Jens photo
Appreciate Rog’s comments on germination events. However – picture (limited view I know) seems to show only one age cohort.
Which makes you wonder when you look at lots of small remnants in the landscape around the nation. How stable are they. Do they only persist until the older trees die? Or is it just that germination events are really infrequent? Does grazing by domestic stock in the riparian zone affect all this? Fire?
“So given you dropped out of school how did you end up knowing stuff and what are you doing here?”.
Phil, dropping out of school is a first essential in acquiring knowledge.
Phil, many of our trees, particularly gums, put out, from their roots, a poison, which kills any seedlings of their own species, & other local indigenous ones. This is the natural way of allowing them room, moisture, & nutreints to grow.
Some of our natives require fire for their seed to germinate.
It therefore requires the clearing of an area, by nature, or man, to allow re growth. After the clearing, there will be a profusion of pioneer species, woody weeds, & Wattle. Drive down any new country road, & you will be driving in a Wattle garden for a few years.
Wattles, being a legume, add nitrogen to the soil, & being short lived, soon make way for new groth of the local dominate tree species.
In many of our harsh environments, it will take 3 or 4 consecutive “good” seasons for seedlings to survive. This is why, in many areas all of the trees are from only one or two years seedlings, often quiet a few years apart. Once the natural density is achieved, no more seedlings will surveve.
This is where exotics, from inter state or overseas, become a problem. Most of these are immune to the local trees poison, & hence can grow in profusion, turning natural woodland into impenetrable thickets, usless to man or beast, local or introduced.
Queensland new clearing laws have consigned much of our native forest, & semi cleared, & woodland grazing country to this fate.
It has all ready happened to thousands of acres of national park, north of Gladstone, where mansgement is nonexistent. I have tried to walk some of it, & had to give up.
Government interference in land management, in an attempt to shore shore up the greenie vote, is the gratest danger to our native species.
It could be a positive if we did not have so many poorly educated, activist “Environmental scientists” from B grade courses in our government departments.
Bad advice, & a tendency to want to be seen doing something green, is leading to far too many poor decisions. It does not help, that so few people understand how the bush works, or that those who do, would be the least likely to be listened to.
Hasbeen
Sorry Phil, Only took a couple of pics for fun. Now at the other end of Australia – in Cairns.
But the idea that red gums are dying the length of the river is just rubbish. Over the last few years I’ve driven up and down the Lachlan, Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers to as far west as about Cohuna – lots and lots of beautiful healthy trees. There is apparently a problem in South Australia – but given the MDBC haven’t distinguished between stressed, very stressed and dead in their surveys – difficult to understand the extent of the problem.
Jen – we were just enjoying ourselves doing a bit of virtual synecology through your photograph. However am interested in the issue of recruitment – and you can see we’ve being having discussions. Wasn’t suggesting any dying trees from your photograph.
I lived in Deniliquin for 20 years. I have some photos, as well as original oil paintings in my Flickr page of the trees along the Edward River. It is a truly beautiful place.
It is true that many places around Deniliquin have been destroyed by salt, but not everywhere. There are still a lot of beautiful trees there.
http://www.arthives.com/visualartist/admin/
Above is a link to one of my web sites with a painting of the consequences of salinity.
Correct link for my website.
This is the correct link