Rangelands 2008 - taking the pulse

Product Information

This report, Rangelands 2008 - taking the pulse, is the first time that disparate datasets have been brought together at a national and regional scale to report change in Australia's rangelands. The rangelands cover some 81 per cent of Australia and are popularly known as "the outback".

The major findings of the report are as follows:

Rainfall variability is one of the major drivers of change in the rangelands.

Much of our current understanding of change in the rangelands derives from pastoral monitoring programs that report specifically on pastoral land management.

Landscape function - a measure of the landscape's capability to capture and retain rainfall and nutrients - increased or remained stable between 1992 and 2005 at a majority of pastoral monitoring sites.

Historically, rangeland biodiversity has substantially declined, and there is no reason to believe that the decline has been arrested. Our ability to report change in biodiversity cintinues to be limited by inadequate data.

Up to 40 per cent of some tropical savanna bioregions burn each year. A national system for reporting the extent and frequency of fire is now in place.

Eleven plant species have the capacity to permanently alter ecosystems across Australia's rangelands.

Land values increased appreciably between 1992 and 2005 across most of the grazed rangelands - far more than could be accounted for by increases in real productivity.

The Australian Collaborative Rangeland Information System (ACRIS) provides an excellent baseline for ongoing tracking of natural resource mamangement in the rangelands.