Remotely sensed and modelled pasture biomass, land condition and the potential to improve grazingmanagement decision tools across the Australian rangelands

Summary

This project is a co-contribution by MLA to a $1.5m, 2 year National Landcare Programme (NLP) Grant awarded to the Rangelands Alliance and administered by Queensland South West NRM and the CRC Spatial Information. The objectives of  initial 2 year NLP investment is to establish the necessary on-line spatial information systems and data necessary to enable the development of best-practice (standardized) digital farms and grazing plans for any location in Australia. The project will also develop simple dashboard tools to allow non-specialist users the ability to access, analyse and visualise paddock-scale time-series indicators of land condition and trends to inform management and provide technical & extension support & training for land managers. Critically the need to is to enable conversion of monitoring data (pasture, ground cover, vegetation), into improved stocking decisions. This is the aim of the MLA co-contribution.

MLA's co-contribution is to commence the development of capabilities in the NRM spatial hub infrastructure by reviewing and assessing the potential for utilising remote sensing of land condition data (property scale - based on fractional ground cover) to improve biomass, productivity, pasture growth models and grazing decision tools (eg safe carrying capacity) across the Australian rangelands.