18.07.2014 Views

soil-conservation-people-religion-and-land.pdf - South West NRM

soil-conservation-people-religion-and-land.pdf - South West NRM

soil-conservation-people-religion-and-land.pdf - South West NRM

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

Create successful ePaper yourself

Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.

Range Monitoring Workshop<br />

Nat. S.C. Conf., W.A.<br />

11 September 1989<br />

INTRODUCTION<br />

MANAGING THE UNMANAGEABLE - BUILDING ENVIRONMENTAL<br />

FEEDBACK INTO PASTORAL SYSTEMS<br />

B R Roberts<br />

Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education<br />

Toowoomba Qld 4350<br />

This overview aims to give a critical analysis of why feedback<br />

through rangel<strong>and</strong> monitoring is necessary, what purposes it is<br />

required for, how it is used in practice <strong>and</strong> what the role of<br />

short <strong>and</strong> long term monitoring is in the overall system of<br />

feedback.<br />

In the pastoral zone we are attempting to manage a dynamic<br />

resource within a climatic framework which is not only beyond<br />

our control but for which we have poor predictive ability -<br />

thus the title of this paper. In this age of high technology<br />

<strong>and</strong> remote sensing we have powerful tools for measuring<br />

changes in our pastoral ecosystem <strong>and</strong> there may be a danger of<br />

our infatuation with the technology overriding certain of the<br />

ecological concepts on which reliable.interpretation of our<br />

field data depends. In his paper to this workshop, Wilcox<br />

contends that we as scientists have let the community down by<br />

not attaining sound management of the nation's rangel<strong>and</strong><br />

resources, despite the funds <strong>and</strong> expensive technology made<br />

available to us for 20 years.<br />

To the initiated it would seem unnecessary to explain why we<br />

need monitoring systems for our rangel<strong>and</strong>s, but it needs to be<br />

realized that a major proportion of Australia's rangel<strong>and</strong>s<br />

showed signs of deterioration when the national suwey was<br />

made in 1975. There is a .clear need to recognize that as far<br />

as Australia's national l<strong>and</strong> degradation is concerned, the<br />

amount of <strong>soil</strong> loss, in absolute terms, is much greater in the<br />

pastoral zone than in the cropping zone. While the hard<br />

evidence for reduction of carrying capacity in the pastoral<br />

zone is limited, there is little doubt that the pastoral zone<br />

has suffered from a combination of overstocking, drought,<br />

small property size <strong>and</strong> poor distribution of fences <strong>and</strong><br />

waters. The national situation is reflected in the tables<br />

below (Anon, 1978):<br />

J

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!