On St Patrick’s Day 2018 the Heytesbury District experienced severe fires that burnt more than 40,000 hectares of public and private land. The Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning coordinated $620,000 of rehabilitation works within the district.
One of the final projects in the rehabilitation program was the aerial seeding in April at Lake Cobrico, a swamp wildlife reserve near Camperdown. Due to concerns that the lake’s ecosystem might not be able to regenerate naturally after the high intensity fires, drones were used to distribute 32 kilograms of native seed over 40 hectares of the burnt lakebed.
The ecologists Landtech Consulting assessed the impact of the drone on revegetation, comparing images taken from drone flights in 2020 and 2022.
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