Progress on a long-term plan to rehabilitate ACT's woodland, grassland, and aquatic habitats has largely been given a tick of approval in the latest environmental report card.
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But the ACT is lagging in some areas of its decade-long nature conservation strategy, including work on reserve management plans for the Canberra Nature Park and the Molonglo River Reserve, and efforts to translocate some threatened species.
An interim report on the 2013-23 ACT conservation strategy was released on Thursday, which found the government had completed 28 milestones by December, was on track on 68 others, but was lagging behind schedule in eight areas.
Significant success was achieved in consolidating and connecting 60,000 hectares of the region's box-gum grassy woodland landscape, the largest remaining area of its kind in Australia.
Restoration and regeneration of woodlands is being completed in six key priority areas, mostly in Canberra's north.
The work has been helped by world-leading research at the Mulligans Flat Woodlands Sanctuary, which has seen the reintroduction of the locally extinct eastern bettong to the ACT.
The eastern bettong, a small marsupial related to kangaroos, is a rare environmental success story, and Canberra played the pivotal role in bringing it back from the brink of extinction on the Australian mainland.
The bettongs were brought from Tasmania to the Mulligans Flat sanctuary in 2012 as part of the first "wild-to-wild" translocation of the marsupial.
The population has since increased from 30 to more than 200.
Work at the sanctuary also enabled the re-introduction of the new Holland mouse, bush stone-curlews, and eastern quoll.
Significant progress has been made in improving native grasslands, including by combating invasive weeds, and in restoring the Murrumbidgee aquatic habitat and native fish populations, which had fallen to 10 per cent of pre-European levels.
Environment Minister Simon Corbell said on Thursday the work, although often invisible to the public, was leading to "tangible improvements on the ground".
"For example, in the West Belconnen hills area, we've seen over 23,000 trees planted on over 200 hectares of land, substantially rehabilitating some very degraded parts of our nature reserve system," Mr Corbell said.
"We've also seen fantastic outcomes in terms of the reintroduction of endangered species, including species that were extinct here on the mainland of Australia."
Other areas of the conservation strategy had not progressed as well, the report found.
Efforts to work with the federal, NSW local and state governments to develop a catchment management plan have lagged, as has work on an action plan on migratory species.
Further work on management plans for the Canberra Nature Park and Molonglo River Reserve are also behind schedule, the report said.
The government is also behind on plans for migratory species and biomass management for grassland reserves.
Mr Corbell said those would be areas of focus before the next report card. "They will remain areas of focus and obviously we do have until 2023 to complete those milestones," he said.
