Rainfall variability is a challenge to sustainable and profitable cattle production in northern Australia. Strategies recommended to manage for rainfall variability, like light or variable stocking, are not widely adopted. This is due partly to the perception that sustainability and profitability are incompatible. A large, long-term grazing trial was initiated in 1997 in north Queensland, Australia, to test the effect of different grazing strategies on cattle production.

Targets for improvements in water quality entering the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) have been set through the Reef Water Quality Protection Plan (Reef Plan). To measure and report on progress towards the targets set a program has been established that combines monitoring and modelling at paddock through to catchment and reef scales; the Paddock to Reef Integrated Monitoring, Modelling and Reporting Program (Paddock to Reef Program). This program aims to provide evidence of links between land management activities, water quality and reef health.

Generally, sustainability dimension is related to a context, timing and scale. Although the context of sustainability can be various – either general or more specific, the timing is oriented to the long-term, but the scale has a global nature. The main purpose of the paper is to assess analytically the sustainable development concept.

Vertical vegetation structure in rangeland ecosystems can be a valuable indicator for monitoring rangeland health or progress toward management objectives because of its importance for assessing riparian areas, post-fire recovery, wind erosion, and wildlife habitat. Federal land management agencies are directed to monitor and manage rangelands at landscapes scales, but traditional field methods for measuring vegetation heights are often too costly and time consuming to apply at these broad scales.

Government agencies are subject to increasing public scrutiny of land management practices. Consequently, rigorous, yet efficient, monitoring protocols are needed to provide defensible quantitative data on the status and trends of rangeland vegetation. Rigor requires precise, repeatable measures, whereas efficiency requires the greatest possible information content for the amount of resources spent acquiring the information. We compared two methods--point frequency and visual estimate--of measuring canopy cover of individual plant species and groups of species (forbs vs.

Fire regimes are changing throughout the world. Changed fire patterns across northern Australian savannas have been proposed as a factor contributing to recent declines of small‐ and medium‐sized mammals. Despite this, few studies have examined the mechanisms that underpin how species use habitat in fire‐affected landscapes. We determined the habitats and resources important to the declining golden‐backed tree‐rat (Mesembriomys macrurus) in landscapes partially burnt by recent intense fire.

Scattered trees are declining rapidly on Australian farms, a process that threatens landscape sustainability. Addressing this decline requires, in part, understanding how landholders perceive and manage scattered trees. We explored this via a quantitative survey of landholders in the Lachlan catchment of New South Wales. Although landholders are typically aware that scattered trees are declining more rapidly than other trees on the land they manage, they are less likely to actively encourage their regeneration compared to other trees.

Transboundary haze pollution from smoke from land preparation fires has become a perennial problem in Indonesia, especially in the last 10 years during the dry season. Most of that smoke originates from illegal land preparation fires for oil palm and industrial forest plantation as well as from shifting cultivation, which is usually blamed for the smoke.

Water is essential for agriculture including livestock. Given increasing global concern that access to agricultural water will constrain food production and that livestock production uses and degrades too much water, there is compelling need for better understanding of the nature of livestock-water interactions. Inappropriate animal management along with poor cropping practices often contributes to widespread and severe depletion, degradation and contamination of water.

Understanding cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) dynamics in the Northern Great Basin rangelands, USA, is necessary to effectively manage the region's lands. This study's goal was to map and monitor cheatgrass performance to identify where and when cheatgrass dieoff occurred in the Northern Great Basin and to discover how this phenomenon was affected by climatic, topographic, and edaphic variables. We also examined how fire affected cheatgrass performance.