In 2020, the Peter und Luise Hager Foundation in Germany gifted the Institute a generous €30k Euro donation to support our bushfire recovery efforts, monitoring and assessing the impacts of fire on flora and fauna in key areas across the Blue Mountains national park.
Knowing that there is still more work to be done, they have again supported us with another €10k Euro in 2021.
The Peter und Luise Hager Foundation develops, supports and implements a variety of philanthropic projects around the world. They are currently supporting 36 projects in 13 countries, across their five key funding areas of education, scientific research, arts and culture, the environment and social work.
The core values of the Peter und Luise Hager Foundation are solidarity, public spirit, sustainability, authenticity and humanity. They provide more than just a willingness to help - they aim to ensure that assistance is provided exactly where it is required, when it is needed.
After the summer fires that devastated Australia, affecting 80% of the GBMWHA, the Foundation immediately sought to find Australian organisations that they could work with and support to directly aid the fire recovery process.
The Institute is immensely grateful to the Peter und Luise Hager Foundation for caring enough to support Australia’s fire recovery.
In 2020, their generous gift enabled us to continue and expand our ecological monitoring field work, even in the face of the limitations imposed by Covid-19. While other organisations struggled to continue operating throughout 2020, the Institute was able to recruit scientists, train volunteers, and equip them with tools, field guides and field kits to carry out an expanded monitoring program across 28 sites in the mid to upper mountains.
Thanks to their renewed gift in 2021, we now have the assurance to be able to continue recruiting, training and inducting citizen scientists to conduct the fieldwork necessary to maintain a long-term record of the impacts of climate change, fire, drought, flood and urban development on our flora, fauna and ecosystems.
Our ever expanding monitoring program now includes several Upland Swamps and the burnt Blue Glum Forest area in the Grose Valley, so we are planning for an uptick in activity in 2021 as well as the need to recruit more citizen scientists to carry out the field work.
Want to support our eco-monitoring program?
To date, we have crowdsourced over 33,000 observations of over 4,000 species on our iNaturalist biodiversity tracker. Download iNaturalist and start recording observations today!
If you are interested in supporting us or volunteering as a citizen scientist, click here to learn how to get involved.