The blueprint behind OzFish and why you should get involved
Helping each other. It’s the bedrock of Australian culture. A duty that embodies the respect we give to one another, to our country and to the creatures that make it such a special place to live.
It’s a value OzFish holds at its core. At heart, we are a group of passionate volunteers committed to taking small consistent actions that create massive and lasting impacts to our beloved waterways.
Our team’s shared expertise within aquatic ecology, project management and environmental restoration has laid the path for the triumphs we’ve enjoyed over the past five years.
Whether it’s our program managers applying for environmental grants, our field staff analysing water samples and monitoring restoration sites, or our band of ambassadors flying the OzFish flag at events, we’ve been able to work together and create significant habitat improvements on local, regional and national levels.
But we haven’t done this alone.
The success of OzFish is possible thanks to our incredible partnerships. We’re happy to have become the glue that binds the shared environmental interests of landowners, the community and grant providers with our corporate sponsors and organisational partners.
Our list of supporters is always growing. Some small. Some big. BCF – Boating, Camping, Fishing has allowed us to scale nationally and create change we never thought was possible, while local businesses that fund our smaller projects keep the wheels moving in communities we never thought we would reach.
Whoever it may be, we offer a tip of the bucket hat to everyone who makes our efforts possible.
Our army of volunteers are the secret ingredient to creating change.
With a team in place, and growing financial backing, the final piece of the OzFish puzzle is the army of volunteers that donate their time, energy, blood, sweat, and tears to the cause.
All recreational fishers have an attachment to their local waterway, and sometimes all that is needed to ignite that flicker of motivation within them is other people who feel the same and want to do something about it. This is where the OzFish Chapter is born.
We bring people together and give them the resources to go out and make habitat a priority in the waters they call their backyard, with their only reward being that local fish populations will one day be better off than they are now.
Unfortunately, we still face habitat threats that impact our precious fish species. We aren’t naïve to the problem that we have chosen to solve. Yet, the solutions we have in place, and the projects we have up and running across the country, has us well placed to make a difference. For instance:
River Repair Buses
In a few short years we has demonstrated what is possible. We now has a fleet of River Repair Buses transporting equipment and volunteers to sites across the Murray-Darling Basin. They keep a constant eye on the state of our inland waterways, replanting natives on riparian zones, clearing litter, weeding, developing major resnagging work, facilitating citizen science programs and supporting emergency fish recovery efforts in times of drought, fire, and flood. In the last 12 months, OzFish has deployed 257 woody snags and 215 rocky reefs to provide this healthy complex habitat to our inland rivers.
Seagrass Restoration
OzFish members are also delivering the country’s largest community-driven seagrass restoration initiative. It supports more than 400 volunteers a year to reseed more than one million seagrass seeds to where they are most needed in Cockburn Sound for vital pink snapper breeding grounds. This has led to other seagrass programs in every other state.
Our innovative seagrass restoration trail in Tasmania is working with researchers from the CSIRO to test Environmentally Friendly Moorings (EFMs). Traditional anchors can damage delicate habitats, especially seagrass beds but EFMs benefits boat owners as they are easier to use and require less effort without damaging delicate seagrass beds.
Trees for Fish
The vegetation alongside waterways also plays a vital role in the water quality and health of the fishery. Removing invasive weeds, such as willows, and planting native trees and shrubs not only mitigates flooding and erosion but provides Murray cod with shade and a source of food through insect fall. Over the past year, OzFish has planted 39,910 native trees and shrubs along 376km of riverbanks.
Shellfish Revolution
Our shellfish restoration initiatives are making a real difference too, with the flagship program in Moreton Bay recently showing that restoration efforts have resulted in three million new baby oysters and more than four million other creatures living on a previously functionally extinct habitat. And these are just some of the many initiatives taking place across the country.
The results prove community-driven restoration leads to more effective and sustainable outcome. That means healthier waterways are around for us to enjoy now and for future generations.
All these crucial environmental initiatives are just some of the projects behind the powerful momentum that helps OzFish leverage millions of dollars and mobilise Australian communities in repairing our fish habitats.
We’re here to make the right kind of change that makes everyone and everything uniquely Australian. We are here to not only help each other, but to help the environment, in what is the largest community-driven conservation movement Australia has seen.