Coarse woody debris (CWD) has many benefits in restoration, including protecting seedlings from herbivory, and it is often reintroduced where CWD is depauperate. At Calperum Station on the Murray River floodplain, artificially applied CWD (‘branching’) is being trialled to restore erosion scalds. At two erosion scalds, we applied 900 m² of branching and created a 900 m² branching‐free control. We predicted that branching would protect seedlings from browsing by mammalian herbivores. We planted Nitre Goosefoot (Chenopodium nitrariaceum ) seedlings in each treatment and measured the number of terminal ends affected by herbivory and plant height for 8 weeks. Branching reduced the number of terminal ends affected by herbivory by ~80% and plant height loss by ~60%. Remote cameras detected some browsing by kangaroos, the most abundant herbivores on the Calperum floodplain, although cameras were too few to directly observe much of the browsing that occurred. We did not detect an effect of site browsing pressure on overall herbivory or the effectiveness of the branching. Despite the small sample size, our results suggest that branching can effectively reduce herbivory. It is likely that the effectiveness of branching in reducing herbivory is conditional on a range of factors, such as browsing pressure (i.e. scat density), so a large‐scale trial is required to clarify the role branching has on reducing herbivory in relation to these complex interactions.

中文翻译：

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复杂的木质粗碎屑的“分支”减少了侵蚀性烫伤的草食

粗大的木屑（CWD）在恢复方面有很多好处，包括保护幼苗免受草食，并且经常在CWD消失的地方重新引入。在墨累河漫滩的卡尔珀鲁姆站，正在尝试人工施用的CWD（“分支”）以恢复侵蚀性烫伤。在两个侵蚀尺度上，我们应用了900 m ²的分支，并创建了900 m ^2的无分支控制。我们预测分枝将保护幼苗免受哺乳动物食草动物的浏览。我们种植了Nitre Goosefoot（Chenopodiumnitroariaceum）每种处理中的幼苗，并测量受草食和植物高度影响的末端数量，持续8周。分枝使受食草影响的末端数量减少了约80％，植物高度降低了约60％。远程相机检测到袋鼠浏览了一些内容，袋鼠是卡勒普洪泛滥平原上最丰富的草食动物，尽管相机数量太少，无法直接观察到发生的大部分浏览。我们没有发现站点浏览压力对整体草食或分支有效性的影响。尽管样本量很小，但我们的结果表明分支可以有效减少草食动物。减少草食的分支效果可能取决于一系列因素，例如浏览压力（即粪便密度），