Speaker

Using volunteers for coastal weed management: insights from the Sea Spurge Remote Area Teams (SPRATS) group. 

For the past 16 years the SPRATS group has been working as part of the WildCare Tasmania network to remove invasive weeds from the mostly world heritage listed west and south coasts of Tasmania between Cape Sorell and Cockle Creek.

The group has been using the adventure volunteering concept, which is the explicit linking of effective and targeted environmental work with high value recreational experiences. This strategy has proved effective for providing land managers with a pool of skilled, motivated, effective and experienced workers who drive the work programs, while at the same time, the volunteers’ high level and rewarding recreational experiences results in their staying active in the program and performing long term, targeted follow-up work. This talk reviews and outlines some of the criteria that need to be met in order for these programs to be effective.