Hi my name is Jen Mealy and I'm a land service officer at North Coast Local Land Service and today we are on the banks of the Maguayas Creek in the Austinville Plateau. If you own Riverfront land you may have been impacted and seen dramatic changes to your waterway with this year's flight events. You might be concerned with a number of new weeds on your property. Today we would like to provide you with insights on how to manage those weeds in your Oparian area post-flood. The silver lining to floods is that they can provide a clean slate for you to manage your weeds in your riparian area. New weeds may have washed down in the flood and will need to be managed to keep your Riverbank healthy. When it is safe to do so, a special site for any unfamiliar plants to develop a weed management plan. What to do if you find new weeds on your property? Some ground cover is better than no cover, so timing is important. Minimize soil disturbance. If mature weeds are on site, consider alternative options to spraying. When choosing how and when to treat weed infestations, a number of factors need to be taken into consideration. The identification of weeds. Growth habitat? Are they a ground cover, a vine, a shrub or a tree? The time in the seasonal cycle of the weed. When is the best time to treat this weed for the outcome that you are wanting? The age and size? Establishing what method will have the best result for your circumstances? Seasonal weather conditions? Treatments work best when the plant is actively growing. So following a destructive flood event, weeds have been brought onto your property and they need to be controlled in a way that doesn't create further thanks to ability issues. Before the flood, you may have had intact vegetation that has been removed as a result of high velocity water flow. You may have started with a degraded creek line, absent of all vegetation, and you've noticed erosion on your property. You might be thinking, how can I reinstate natural vegetation? Weed control should be carried out as part of a holistic plan for riparian restoration. The aim is to reinstate natural vegetation because of the great buffering effect that has of stabilizing the creek and holding the bank together. Weeds have a tendency to become dominant and can out-compete native vegetation. You need to replace that weed with something else because it'll be present and can reinfect the site if it's not captured or harnessed with some native vegetation that will take its place. Weed control techniques that you might consider applying are mechanical or manual removal of weed propagules, herbicide treatment, cutting and painting, the vines according to industry best practice, cutting low, using the appropriate amount of herbicide, stem injecting the weed species with the appropriate mixture of herbicide under a registered label, identifying which species are which, having a plan to revisit the area because you can't simply control weeds in one instance. There may be a seed bank of weed that you need to revisit that area and also scraping and painting of vines weeds. Following flooding, some of the most common weeds that may not have been on your property before may be Madeira Vine. It has small to large propagules that are often distributed in water courses. It has the ability to completely smother canopy and dominate rainforests. It can break small trees, it can break large trees so it's one to be very mindful of. Other vineweeds are Ipermea, morning glory vine, also has the same habit where it will grow over the top of trees. Other weeds that have the ability to be transported in flood water, castor oil, you need to take care when treating castor oil because it can be poisonous. If you have livestock on your property, it's important to consider that following flooding, weeds that have germinated on your property may infact be poisonous to your livestock and it's important to learn some of these species that are in fact toxic to your cattle. There's plenty of resources available to help you with your plant identification or your weed identification. It may be worth learning restoration techniques to control these weeds. As a general guide, we deal with understory weeds that are in the ground layer first. Then we progress to mid-story weeds, often woody weeds like lanternar, canvalloral, largely private, small leaf private and then we assess what canopy weeds there are. By managing the weeds on your property, you would do in your part to keep the riparian area healthy and future-proofing your waterway against future floods. Remember, good natural resource management is good farm management.