Healthy Country Trial, Centre Rd

This site, near Forrest, is the focus of a collaborative trial which explores place-based, biocultural forest management, led by EMAC with DEECA and CEC. 

It represents a distinctive “management as experiment” approach – understanding and documenting the impact of forest ‘thinning’ undertaken since 2010 both to enhance biodiversity and provide local firewood.

Interventions at Centre Road - a combination of historic ecological thinning (for the purpose of firewood collection) with the reintroduction of biocultural fire - will provide an important test case for how collaborative management can generate knowledge while also fulfilling cultural obligations to Country. 

Rather than being established as a controlled trial, the site is being shaped through a Traditional Owner-led, adaptive approach that deliberately blends cultural objectives with ecological learning. Planned experimental management - combining thinning with the application of biocultural fire - will contribute directly to EMAC’s emerging vision for forest Country. 

The challenge is not simply to monitor outcomes, but to do so in a way that respects the flexibility and responsiveness of a learning-by-doing process.

By embracing this experimental biocultural approach, Centre Road has the potential to demonstrate how monitoring can be both scientifically rigorous and culturally grounded - providing lessons not just for the Otways, but for forest management more broadly.