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In this section you will find detailed information, including national overviews and state and regional level assessments, from the 2000-2002 National Land and Water Resources Audit theme assessments.
Northern Territory: Monitoring activities
Range monitoring, resource inventory, condition assessment and lease inspection activities in the Northern Territory by the Department of Lands, Planning and Environment.
- Land resource assessment and mapping, pastoral lease monitoring and infrastructure mapping, regional land monitoring, lease inspection activities and support for land administration are all undertaken within the Northern Territory Department of Lands Planning and Environment.
- The NT has a program of land resource mapping at various scales from NT wide to individual properties
- Monitoring of the pastoral estate is a two tiered system, called Tier 1 and Tier 2.
- Tier 1 is operational NT wide, while Tier 2 covers the VRD, Sturt Plateau, the Barkly Tablelands, the Mary River catchment and some of the Alice Springs District.
- The Tier 1 system consists of permanent photo sites located in each of the major paddocks (or grazing areas) on pastoral leases. Soil and vegetation observations are recorded.
- Output from Tier 1 is contained in a Pastoral Land Monitoring File. Copies of this file are provided to the Pastoral Land Board and to pastoral lessees. In the future, it is also proposed to prepare a Pastoral Lease Report during Tier 1 monitoring property visits which will include condition assessments by traverse and an overview condition statement about the property.
- The Tier 2 rangeland monitoring program uses two different (but related) satellite-based methods to account for regional variation between the tropical savannas in the north and the arid interior to the south. Intensive soil, landscape and vegetation measurements are made at a limited number of permanent ground sites.
- In the NT, remote sensing is seen as the major means of broad scale monitoring, with ground based sites predominantly used to inform the remote sensing. Of the various states/NT this is the most sophisticated system and includes an explicit focus on landscape processes rather than vegetation species composition.
- Lease cadastre and infrastructure maps are updated at regular intervals and provided at 1:250,000 scale.
- Land administration is focused on conservation of the base resource for pastoral purposes. Lease conditions in the Pastoral Land Act do not include the need to manage for biodiversity. Nor is there an explict requirement to monitor biodiversity. However, DLPE monitoring of landscape processes has relevance to maintenance of biodiversity.
Further Information
Link to photographic sequences
Link to Map maker to make a map using this information.
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