The number almost no one publishes
There is a statistic almost every environmental campaign reports, and almost none of them follow up on:
Trees planted.
It is an easy number to produce and a difficult one to stand behind, because a tree planted is not the same as a tree that lived. Survival depends on species selection, on soil, on the season, on whether anyone came back to check. Across the restoration sector, the gap between the number announced and the number still standing five years later is rarely published, because it is rarely known.
That gap is the reason we have partnered with veritree.
What the partnership commits to
Together we are planting and verifying 100,000 native trees across Australia.
Thirty thousand of those will go into two Victorian restoration sites: the Yarra Valley, in partnership with Yarra Ranges Council, and South Gippsland, in partnership with the Nerrena/Tarwin Valley Landcare Group. The remaining 70,000 will restore Hindmarsh Valley in South Australia.
Planting has already begun. On Friday 31 July, more than 1,000 native trees went into the ground at Black Spur Creek in South Gippsland. The following day, Saturday 1 August, another 2,000 were planted at Woori Yallock in the Yarra Valley, alongside volunteers, Yarra Ranges Council staff and a visiting team from veritree.
Why verification is the point
veritree is a nature-technology platform that funds and verifies restoration. It uses field data and satellite monitoring to confirm that trees are not only planted but growing, and it has verified more than 182 million trees for over 300 organisations worldwide.
Every planting session under this partnership goes through veritree’s three-level verification process. That changes what we are able to tell you. Instead of a single announcement number, we can report on how these sites are actually recovering, year by year.
It also changes the incentives on the ground. When survival is measured rather than assumed, species selection and site preparation stop being details and start being the whole job.
For a partner funding restoration, it is the difference between a contribution and an investment with a return you can see.
What 92% looks like
The Yarra Valley planting site is a good illustration, because the survival data already exists.
The Yarra Valley Biolink Project is a council-led restoration program along the Yarra Valley Trail at Woori Yallock, a council-managed wildlife corridor beside the Birrarung. Yarra Ranges Council has grown it from 9,000 plants in 2021 to around 70,000 native plants in 2025, and has achieved a 92% survival rate across that work.
Ninety-two per cent is an unusual number to see published. Most restoration programs cannot report it because they never measured it. Yarra Ranges Council can, and it is the single strongest reason this was a site worth backing.
The corridor is being revegetated to restore connectivity for native flora and fauna, with priority given to habitat that supports Koalas, Gang-gang Cockatoos, Powerful Owls and Greater Gliders. It has also become a genuine community asset, engaging 25 schools and more than 1,000 students, nine university placement students and nine environmental and community groups, with ongoing partnerships across Upper Yarra schools and Deakin University.
The 2,000 trees planted on 1 August form part of a 15,000-tree commitment for that site.
We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people, of the Woiwurrung language group of the Kulin Nation, as Traditional Owners of the Yarra Valley. Their connection to this land and to the Birrarung goes back tens of thousands of years.
Three landscapes, three different jobs
The Yarra Valley is a connectivity project. The Biolink restores a continuous corridor of native vegetation along the Birrarung so that wildlife can move safely through a landscape that has been opened up. Yarra Ranges Council leads the ecological design.
South Gippsland focuses on wetland restoration. The Black Spur Creek Wetlands Project is restoring around 60 hectares of high-value wetland at the confluence of the Tarwin River and Black Spur Creek, in the Tarwin River Catchment. It is critical habitat for the Strzelecki Koala, the Southern Brown Bandicoot, the River Blackfish and the critically endangered Slender Tree Fern. The Nerrena/Tarwin Valley Landcare Group has established more than 45,000 native plants there since 2016, replacing invasive weeds with local species. Our partnership builds on work that was already nine years underway.
We acknowledge the Gunaikurnai and Bunurong peoples as Traditional Owners of South Gippsland, represented by the Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation and the Bunurong Land Council Aboriginal Corporation.
Hindmarsh Valley in South Australia is the largest of the three at 70,000 trees. It sits in the Hindmarsh River catchment on the Fleurieu Peninsula, where the southern Mount Lofty Ranges fall away toward Victor Harbor. Much of the valley is farmland today, and this planting will bring native vegetation back into the catchment, creating habitat that local wildlife can return to and move through.
The part that doesn’t scale
Funding moves quickly. Ecological knowledge does not.
Every one of these sites depends on people who were already there. Council ecologists who know which species belongs on which slope. Landcare volunteers who have spent nine years building relationships with local landholders. Students who have been planting the same corridor since primary school.
We have spent over 55 years supporting exactly this kind of local work, and the pattern is consistent. Projects succeed where local commitment already exists. Our role is to remove the funding constraint, not to replace the expertise.
What happens next
The first 3,000 trees are in the ground, and there are many more to come across all three landscapes. We’ll keep sharing what we see as these sites grow, from the Birrarung to the Fleurieu.
