Review of a regional scale grassland condition monitoring method

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

6-2025

Conference Title

XII International Rangeland Congress 2025: Working Together for our Global Rangelands Future

Place of Publication

Adelaide

ISBN

978-0-646-72121-7

Keywords

grazing, pasture, longitudinal, frequency, comparative analysis

Disciplines

Agricultural Education | Environmental Monitoring | Soil Science

Abstract

This paper outlines the review and development of site selection and field data collection protocols for enabling the continuation of the state government's Western Australian Rangeland Monitoring System (WARMS) beyond 2024. The primary purpose of WARMS remains to detect change in the condition and trend of the extensive rangelands across Western Australia. The Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) aims to align WARMS with the move to risk-based monitoring and assessment outlined in DPIRD's Framework for Sustainable Pastoral Land Management. Regular reviews of monitoring methods, collaboration with industry stakeholders and governing bodies are required to ensure the system's robustness and relevance for management of public lands. A revision of DPIRD's grassland field site-selection and data collection protocols is presented with two main goals: (1) to improve monitoring effectiveness by aligning sites with key pastures and broad ecosystem types identified in ecological State and Transition models (Richards et al. 2023), and reducing the total number of sites monitored; and (2) to modify site spatial configuration and align data collection with national standards for fractional cover data collection, while maintaining longitudinal continuity with the WARMS program. The co-location of nationally comparable sites with suitable WARMS sites would be an efficient way to provide the ground measured data needed for calibration of remotely sensed fractional cover estimates, if the changes in data collection protocols prove compatible with previous WARMS condition trend detection. Methods for using remote sensing data to directly monitor rangeland condition and degradation risk will be explored. In 2024 we began a field program of monitoring pasture condition using the existing WARMS site layout in tandem with the star transect layout for cover measurement in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Data from the two transect configurations will be analysed to assess the practicality of substituting the existing WARMS measurement layout for the star layout without compromising the long-term trend detection.

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