Carlisle Landscape Recovery Initiative

The Carlisle Landscape Recovery Initiative is a collaborative program designed to support recovery and long-term landscape resilience following the January 2026 bushfires.

The fires through more than 11,000 hectares of the western Otways, destroying homes, disrupting communities and burning large areas of forest and heathland. The heathlands hold deep cultural significance for the Traditional Custodians who know them as Ground Parrot Country. They are also widely recognised as one of the most important remaining heathland systems in south-eastern Australia for small mammals, providing critical refuge habitat for threatened Long-nosed Potoroo and Swamp Antechinus.

The Carlisle Landscape Recovery Initiative aims to demonstrate a practical model for bushfire recovery that is evidence-informed,  place-based and biocultural, and landscape-scale and cross-tenure.

The initiative is structured around three complementary components:

• Applied Research and Monitoring Ecological monitoring to track post-fire recovery, assess emerging threats and generate practical insights to inform land management and bushfire resilience.

• Local Stakeholder and Community Engagement Workshops, field events and collaborative forums bringing together Traditional Custodians, land managers, researchers and communities to learn from the recovery process and explore approaches to landscape resilience.

• Regional Knowledge Sharing and Scaling Impact Activities that share insights from the Carlisle recovery with practitioners and communities across south-eastern Australia, contributing to broader learning about disaster recovery in climate-impacted landscapes.

Together, these components will translate ecological monitoring into practical knowledge, strengthen collaboration across the Otways landscape and build shared understanding of how landscapes recover following major disturbance events.

More broadly, the project seeks to demonstrate a practical, place-based model for disaster recovery that integrates scientific evidence, Indigenous knowledge and community experience.