Concerns about excessive sediment loads entering the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) lagoon in Australia have led to a focus on improving ground cover in grazing lands. Ground cover has been identified as an important factor in reducing sediment loads, but improving ground cover has been difficult for…
Coastal and marine ecosystems are adversely affected by diffuse source pollution from agricultural activities in coastal river catchments (or watersheds). To address this issue, government policy has been designed to increase adoption of improved land management practices that are known to…
Private property accounts for much of the planet's arable land, and most of this has been cleared for agricultural production. Agricultural areas retain only fragments of their original vegetation and this has been detrimental to many native plant and animal species. Habitat restoration and…
We describe a model to predict regolith thickness in a 128,000ha study area in the central Mt Lofty Ranges in South Australia. The term regolith encompasses soil (A and B horizons) and highly weathered bedrock (C horizon). The thickness of the regolith has a major control on water holding…
The error in slope gradient estimates provided by digital elevation models propagates to spatial modelling of erosion and other environmental attributes, potentially impacting land management priorities. This study compared the slope estimates of Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) DEMs…
Market-based approaches to conservation provide two novel policy outcomes. First, they secure public environmental benefits through incentive payments to private landowners to deliver those conservation outcomes that are unlikely to be achieved through regulation. Second, they provide…
We reviewed the scope and quality of published literature relevant to management of the risk of fire and accompanying risks to ecological values, in the vegetation types (mostly forests and woodlands, but including grasslands and herbfields) of the High Country (>750m asl) of south-…
Three mega-fires in Victoria over the period 2002–2009 burnt some 3million hectares, or 40% of the state’s public land. In the worst of these bushfires—Black Saturday, 7 February 2009–173 people lost their lives in Australia’s worst civilian tragedy. Each of these three fires was followed by…
This study aimed to unravel the effects of climate, topography, soil, and grazing management on soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks in the grazing lands of north-eastern Australia. We sampled for SOC stocks at 98 sites from 18 grazing properties across Queensland, Australia. These samples covered…
This themed issue of Land Use Policy builds on the papers presented at an international symposium entitled Social Dimensions of Market-based Instruments, convened by the Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, in November 2010. The symposium set out to review the extent to which market-…
Market-based policy instruments are used in the design of land management programs to provide incentives to landholders to generate efficient ecological outcomes on private land. Despite the increased use of economic instruments, many landholders remain unwilling to participate in these programs…
The time-integrated normalized difference vegetation index (iNDVI) provides key remote-sensing-derived information on the interactions between vegetation growth, climatic and soil conditions, and land use. Using a time-series of Landsat imagery obtained for Queensland, Australia, it has been…