Since European settlement, Australia has seen extensive clearance of native vegetation for agriculture and urbanization with consequent environmental problems including soil erosion, soil acidification, dryland salinity and loss of native biota.
In NSW, some effort is currently being made to reverse this trend of native vegetation loss (e.g. Native Vegetation Advisory Council 2000) and planting native trees on farmed or grazed land is potentially an important element of such a strategy (Saunders & Hobbs 1995). It is widely believed that the restoration of trees in the landscape will help to reverse some of the land degradation and biodiversity loss that has occurred (Smith et al. 2000) but this belief has not been thoroughly tested, especially with regard to soil condition.
This note presents preliminary findings from an ongoing project that aims to determine the ecological effects of restoring native tree cover on farmland in NSW. The results presented were generated from a pilot study on a series of tree plots near Gunnedah. Specifically, this note reports on that component of the project relating to the influence of tree plantings on soil condition and carbon storage. Other elements of the work will be reported elsewhere.