Based in Far North Queensland, Rainforest Rescue is a not-for-profit environmental organisation undertaking on-ground conservation in the Daintree. Since 1999, the organisation has protected and restored rainforest by purchasing high-conservation-value properties, safeguarding biodiversity, and carrying out restoration activities including tree planting, maintenance, and weed removal.
Rainforest Rescue's Cassowary Credit project is located within the Daintree Oxbow, a floodplain landscape linking two world heritage areas, and connecting the Daintree River and Australia's most biodiverse mangrove system. It is currently one of the most significant restoration project in Australia's Wet Tropics. Much of the Oxbow was cleared for sugarcane farming over the past seventy years and remains severely degraded and fragmented. Restoring the Oxbow reconnects the wildlife corridor between the Daintree National Park and the river system, providing habitat for a range of threatened species such as the Southern Cassowary and Spectacled Flying Fox as well as plenty of other threatened birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians.
The restoration work also rebuilds soil health, improves water quality flowing into the Great Barrier Reef catchment, increases carbon storage and biodiversity, and supports local jobs in seed collection, nursery production and on ground revegetation work.