The Landscapes and Policy Hub is a research collaboration that focuses on integrating ecology and social science to provide guidance for policy makers on planning and management of biodiversity at a regional scale.
Focusing on two contrasting landscapes of the Tasmanian Midlands and the Australian Alps, the research hub is developing tools, techniques and policy options to integrate biodiversity into regional scale planning.
The interdisciplinary research is placing particular emphasis on landscape-scale management of species and communities listed under the under Australia’s primary conservation legislation: Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. This includes ‘Matters of National Environment Significance’ like the Tasmanian Midlands Lowland Grasslands communities and the unique alpine wetlands in the Australian Alps.
The research hub is hosted by the University of Tasmania and is one of five new national research hubs recently funded to study biodiversity conservation by the National Environmental Research Program (NERP) over the next four years.
Landscape Logic was a research partnership between six regional natural resource management organisations, four universities, CSIRO and three State government agencies from 2008 and 2011. Landscape Logic aimed to improve the way decisions were made in catchment management across Australia by examining the links between actions at small scale and natural resource conditions at landscape scale. Landscape Logic was funded by the Australian government under the Commonwealth Environmental Research Facilities (CERF) program.
In 2012, a synthesis book from the Landscape Logic Research Hub was published. The book, ‘Landscape Logic: Integrating Science for Landscape Management’, describes how the collaboration of 42 researchers and environmental managers went about the research. The book describes what they found and what they learned about the challenge of attributing cause to environmental change.
While public programs had been responsible for increase in vegetation extent, there was less evidence for improvement in vegetation condition and water quality. In many cases critical levels of intervention had not been reached, interventions were not sufficiently mature to have had any measurable impact, monitoring had not been designed to match the spatial and temporal scales of the interventions, and interventions lacked sufficiently clear objectives and metrics to ever be detectable. In the process, however, new knowledge emerged on disturbance thresholds in river condition, diagnosing sources of pollution in river systems, and the application and uptake of state-and-transition and Bayesian network models to environmental management.
The findings discussed in this book provide valuable messages for environmental managers, land managers, researchers and policy makers. For more information and to buy a copy of the book, go to: http://www.publish.csiro.au/pid/6769.htm
Landscape Logic was led by Prof. Ted Lefroy, Director of the Centre for Environment.
The leaders of the seven projects that made up Landscape Logic were:
Biodiversity in Grain and Graze (BiGG) aims to identify the benefits biodiversity brings to mixed farming systems, and the contribution that different types of mixed farming can make to conservation of native biodiversity across Australia. Measures of biodiversity being used include soil microbial activity and species richness, and functional group presence in birds, plants and invertebrates.
For more information visit the Grain and Graze website.
In August 2008 BiGG was received a Banksia Environment Award. Read more...
Map of BiGG field sites - enlarge
The project is lead by Dr Kerry Bridle (UTAS) and involves nine regional co-ordinators and sixteen regionally based staff involved in collecting data from forty-seven properties across southern Australia.
Other members of the research team based at the University of Tasmania are:
For more detailed information the following PDF's are available to download.