biodiversity outcomes

In the southwest of Western Australia, sandalwood has been subjected to sustained commercial exploitation since the 1840s, and ravaged by the direct and indirect effects of land clearing for agriculture. Like so many other native plants and animal species, it has all but disappeared from the agricultural southwest of Western Australia, where it was once found in abundance.

Crucially, sandalwood is a hemiparasite that extracts water and nutrients from suitable host plants within reach of it's exploratory root system. spicatum plus™ is a biodiverse, dense, and dynamic association of strategically selected local native plants that is established on cleared agricultural land, that sustains the sandalwood in a taxonomically and structurally diverse ecosystem.

This not only ensures excellent growth and yields; spicatum plus™ creates high value habitat that serves to protect native animals and buffer adjacent vegetation and waterways from threatening processes such as the discharge of sediments, nutrients and salt from adjacent farmland, helping to restore ecological function to the landscape.

spicatum plus™ is being used in just this way to transform landscapes, create habitat and protect flora and fauna in association with Gondwana Link in Australia's only internationally recognised biodiversity hotspot.

While harvesting involves extracting the entire sandalwood tree for processing, the system of hosts remain, and new growth and regeneration is actually stimulated by the disturbance, ensuring the biodiversity and carbon value of the system is sustained.