South Australia: Monitoring activities
- The Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (DEW) has a comprehensive, integrated program of resource inventory, resource condition and lease assessment, lease inspection and rangelands monitoring in place
- Over the last 10 years South Australia has assessed resource condition and established a baseline monitoring system over all pastoral leases in the state
- Each of the 219 pastoral properties on 328 leases covering 409,000 km2 of the rangelands in South Australia now have resource and lease inventory information, resource condition assessments, baseline monitoring sites established and priority paddocks identified for management action
- About 5,500 photopoint monitoring sites have been established, approximately 20,000 Land Condition Index sample points have been assessed and about 4,500 individual paddocks have been assessed and assigned a priority for land management action and further inspection.
- This work is primarily driven by requirements under the Pastoral Land Management and Conservation Act (1989)
- The focus for the DEW activities is on reporting at lease scale (under the Act) rather than at district or state scale for miscellaneous purposes. Lease scale reports remain confidential to the Pastoral Board and the lessee. Little aggregated information is publicly available.
- There is no firm schedule for reassessment of leases or systematic reassessment of photopoint monitoring sites. However, all leases will be reassessed and photopoints revisited within 14 years of the initial work.
- The PLMC Act aims to prevent degradation, therefore re-inspection and reassessment activities are targeted at those areas most at risk
- The theoretical basis for the PLMC Act focuses on conservation of indigenous resources, rather than on those resources for pastoral purposes per se
- DEW staff involved in this program share close links with others within the Agency who are focused on biodiversity inventory, management and monitoring within South Australia.
Percentage of condition rating observations for pasture type communities within Gawler Ranges SCD leases. Class 1 is highly disturbed, Class 3 is minimally disturbed. Such tables provide data on the relative condition of different vegetation types but also indicate the relative proportion of each vegetation type sampled within each District. They do not necessarily represent the relative areas of each vegetation type within the District.
| LCI Rating (%) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vegetation type community | Class 1 | Class 2 | Class 3 | Total |
| Chenopod shrublands | ||||
| 1(a) Treeless plains | 0.30 | 0.64 | 5.56 | 6.51 |
| 1(c) Samphire / saltlake | 0.61 | 1.14 | 6.48 | 8.22 |
| 1(d) Calcareous plains | 1.88 | 9.11 | 16.17 | 27.16 |
| 1(e) Arcoona Tableland | 0.30 | 0.30 | 4.68 | 5.29 |
| 1(g) Blackbush watercourses | 2.08 | 6.78 | 9.52 | 18.38 |
| 1(h) Gawler Range alluvial valleys | 5.23 | 5.20 | 1.41 | 11.85 |
| Total | 10.41 | 23.17 | 43.83 | 77.41 |
| Low woodlands | ||||
| 2(a) Mulga grasslands-sandy | 0.36 | 1.30 | 0.55 | 2.2.1 |
| 2(d) Mallee / blackoak | 3.99 | 5.34 | 6.17 | 15.5 |
| 2(e) Native pine on dunes | 0.33 | 1.14 | 0.28 | 1.74 |
| 2(f) Mallee / spinifex on dunes | 0.00 | 0.39 | 1.16 | 1.555 |
| Total | 4.68 | 8.17 | 8.17 | 21.02 |
| Hummock grasslands | ||||
| 4(a) Gawler Range rhyolite hills | 0.61 | 0.58 | 0.36 | 1.55 |
| Total | 0.61 | 0.58 | 0.36 | 1.55 |
| TOTAL | 15.70 | 31.92 | 52.36 | 100.00 |
Further Information
Link to photographic sequences
Link to the Map Maker to make a map using this information.
PDF files
Some documents on this website are available as PDF files. Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to view PDF files.
Key
Links to an another web site
Opens a pop-up window