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Assessment of biodiversity condition in a rangelands environment using remote sensing

Gary Bastin & Dr Craig James - Centre for Arid Zone Research
CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, 2002

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About the report

The Consultancy Contract with CSIRO specifies the following components delivered in full in a final report by 31st December 2000:

  1. The distribution of land types (land systems) by distance from water and degree of land degradation
  2. Measures of landscape geometry of land types important for biodiversity
  3. Index of potential threats to biodiversity based on known species' responses to distance from water and arrangement of land types within the case study area
  4. Recommendation on a whole landscape approach to using this method in the rangelands
  5. Comments and recommended improvements to the Condition Framework as applied to a rangelands environment
  6. Outcomes from the intersection of the land types and land systems with NVIS vegetation data and an analysis of how well the NVIS data capture rangeland diversity

In this case-study region in central Australia the pastorally more productive land systems, and land systems grouped into broader vegetation types, are more intensively developed with infrastructure for grazing than pastorally less useful country. This means that a low proportion of more productive land types is remote from water and hence lightly grazed. Vegetation types and land systems that contain a high proportion of palatable plants are more degraded than those with less palatable plants when assessed by grazing-gradient satellite analysis.

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