Cost of planting natives can be very high, often up to $20,000 per hectare depending on the density of planting, species selected, size and grade of nursery stock and degree of site preparation and post-plant maintenance required.
This calculator makes it easy for users to determine the cost of establishing natives on a per hectare basis by following tasks and items required as listed in the menu.
Data entry
Users are invited to enter data for each step of the menu. This is a systematic list of tasks and items required to plan and implement your planting project. This includes:
- Entering your area of planting with the option of using a mapping function to help calculate your planting area if not known
- Calculating how many plants you will require for your selected area
- Choosing your desired proportion of native shrubs (often planted as a nurse) to tree species
- Selecting from drop down lists the species of shrubs and trees for planting along with estimated proportion of each
- Entering estimated or quoted costs for site preparation, nursery-raised seedlings, planting, and post-planting care, and other potential costs such as fencing, and pest animal and weed control, and
- For those interested in managing their planted native stands as a long-term timber resource, options and costs for silviculure (pruning and thinning).
Users can elect to use default values for costs for the budgeting items listed in the menu by ticking the box indicated. These are based on average cost of planting and early management of native planting programmes across a range of sites. Costs however are very specific to the site and dependent on the resources and commitment of those undertaking planting, so users can override these default values with their own estimated or quoted costs.
For those only interested in determining the number of plants required, then users can skip the budgeting steps.
Summary report
Once data is entered users are invited to press the “Finish and view report” button to provide a PDF summary of user-entered data, calculations of the number of seedlings by species and cost, and the costs per item selected by the user for planting and post planting management. A total figure of cost per hectare is then provided at the end.