| The health of the creek.... |
Little Stringybark Creek was once a healthy, clear stream flowing through the messmate forests of Mt Evelyn and Wandin.
Its sandy, cobbled bottom bubbled with abundant and diverse life: a startling array of insects, crustaceans, worms and algae lived in its clean waters. Iridescent blue and red spiny crayfish scampered across its sands, while blackfish lurked beneath its heavy snags.
The creek and its floodplain served to purify its waters, retaining the soils and their nutrients that washed off the catchments during floods and ensuring a clean, clear supply of water to the Yarra downstream.
Little Stringybark Creek was once a valuable community asset, but now it is highly degraded, suffering from significant erosion and a dramatic loss of biodiversity.
It is scouring and eroding at an alarming rate; it is polluted, and it supports the sorts of aquatic animals and plants that indicate that it is a tough place to live: a much reduced collection of hardy animals and plants that can survive in polluted urban streams.
It has become a problem to those who live along it, whose land it is eroding, and to its downstream waters to where it is delivering tonnes of sediment and nutrients and other pollutants downstream every year.
Now, most stream restoration projects set about replacing habitat, like snags and rock-riffles in the stream, or replanting stream bank vegetation: undoubtedly important activities to achieve a healthy stream.
But, while Little Stringybark has lost in-stream habitat, and bank-side forest in places, these are not the biggest problems the creek faces. It is in much worse condition than similar rural streams with similar habitat problems.
To restore Little Stringybark Creek, we aim to start by addressing the root cause of its biggest problem: urban stormwater that runs off the houses and roads of Mt Evelyn in its headwaters.
