Incorporation of Practical Measures to Assist conservation of biodiversity within sustainable beef production in Northern Australia

Summary

The broad scientific and communication objectives are to:

Significantly advance conceptual understanding of the relationships between the grazing of cattle and grazing management, and the conservation of regional biodiversity within the variegated landscapes of the north.
Quantify these relationships for at least one ecosystem that is economically important to the northern beef industry.
Link these quantified relationships to measures of productivity, and thence to economic indicators of enterprise returns, and assess alternative management strategies for both economic and biodiversity costs and benefits. Identify practical measures to conserve biodiversity that producers can incorporate within their sustainable management practices, together with simple indicators they can use to assess results and continue to adapt and improve management.
Assess whether the results of this project can be used to assist management for conservation of biodiversity in other ecosystems within northern Australia.
Pro-actively publicise and disseminate project results to the industry and others concerned with natural resource management in northern Australia, including providing assistance to producer-led management within NAP3.
This project takes a whole property perspective, to enable producers and other stakeholders to consider trade-offs that occur between animal production and conservation of biodiversity. Ecological research is identifying how property management influences plant diversity and ecological functioning of pastures. This new information will be used to refine management principles and indicators of ecological health and biodiversity status. Parallel research is examining the economic implications of moving from current management to best-bet scenarios based on our existing understanding of ecological sustainability.

On-going communication activities were built into the research through management panels, involvement of producers managing the case-study properties, and the location of ecological research on the case-study properties. Explicit communication activities involved producer networks and extension specialists. This project is funded under both MLA NAP3 and the LWRRDC-EA Remnant Vegetation Program (Project CTC9). A set of inter-related activities were conducted to meet project objectives.