Australian rangelands in position to lead

Australian and South African Scientists inspecting a soil and vegetation monitoring site in Kruger National Park

The world’s largest rangelands conference was held in Durban in July this year. CEO of the Tropical Savannas CRC, Prof. Gordon Duff , presented at the conference

With more than 140 spoken papers delivered at the VII International Rangelands Conference, up to six sessions running concurrently for four days, plus in excess of 400 posters, it is impossible to try to summarise the entire conference. Instead I will attempt to provide a few observations and lessons gleaned that may be relevant to researchers and land managers in northern Australia.

Relative to most of the rest of the world’s rangelands, Australian systems are not experiencing the huge levels of social and political pressure to produce food irrespective of the longer-term sustainability of production or biodiversity implications. This may be stating the obvious, but the contrast is overwhelming. Our opportunity to develop sustainably in northern Australia isn’t just greater than that of the rest of the world’s rangelands—it’s in a class of its own. This, to me, hammers home the truly unique position occupied by Australian rangelands and the Tropical Savannas CRC.

Monitoring variables such as range condition in South Africa, and probably many other parts of the world, is much more reliant on labour-intensive, on-ground data collection, and less on remote-sensing based tech­nologies. This should be no surprise, but the extent to which we use these technologies contrasts more strongly than I expected. For example, Kruger National Park, with well in excess of a million visitors a year and a tourism-driven, foreign exchange revenue base that probably rivals that of the Great Barrier Reef, nevertheless relies almost entirely on field observations by Parks’ staff for their fire-scar mapping, despite the fact that the Park covers 20 000km ² . There should be an opportunity to export some of our more cost-effective technologies and approaches.

I was particularly keen to see some good working examples of participatory and adaptive management, either in systems focusing on conservation or on production, but while progress has been made, there is still a way to go.

Kruger National Park

A visit to Kruger National Park, and some surrounding game reserves, culminated in a one-day workshop on fire, vegetation, erosion and related monitoring themes, hosted by the South African National Parks Service and conducted by Dr Harry Biggs, Program Manager for Systems Ecology at Kruger.

Our guides were Prof. Pete Zacharias, Dean of Science at University of Natal, and Mike Peel from South African National Parks (SANParks). The workshop was a useful and interesting exchange of ideas and approaches to monitoring, indicators and linking research to management objectives (adaptive management).

The workshop was linked to field days investigating monitoring sites and discussing approaches to monit­oring. Some issues were common to management of Australian rangelands (managing grazing pressure, fire, weed invasion), and some were not (managing elephant impacts, poaching and cross-border incursions). SANParks invest heavily in monitoring, and gather huge amounts of ground-based data from monitoring plots, exclosure experiments (an elephant-proof fence has to be seen to be appreciated), fire-exclusion experiments etc. Some of these studies date back 40 years or more, with continuous data available over the entire history.

Monitoring approaches were reasonably well-coupled to management decision making, using a threshold of probable concern strategy that is well institutionalised. This is an area where the South Africans demonstrate a sophisticated approach to adaptive management that could be quite instructive to some of the work being carried out by the Tropical Savannas CRC and its partners. There are some useful models that will be applicable to some of our fire-management and knowledge-building projects.

Collaborative activities

With respect to biodiversity monitoring, historically most of the emphasis in South Africa has been placed on game animals, and only recently has more interest been shown in more representative biodiversity monitoring of both fauna and flora. Much of the historic emphasis on the latter has been on pasture condition, relating to the support of game populations.

Recent interest in landscape health and monitoring of system-wide biodiversity has provided opportunities for several Australian scientists to contribute advice and expertise, including a number who work with the TS–CRC (including CSIRO SE’s Alan Andersen, David Tongway, Garry Cook, Tracy Dawes-Gromadski, Adam Liedloff and Chris Margules).

Despite this ramping-up of collaborative activity, I believe a significant opportunity exists to both export, and to test/validate in a different context, some of the insights that Tropical Savannas CRC has developed in defining, measuring and monitoring healthy landscapes. Certainly an opportunity for greater collaboration exists.