About the Biodiversity Project

Integrating Paddock and Catchment Planning; a wool producer/landholder -driven approach to sustainable landscape management.

The Traprock Wool Association (now Traprock Group), in collaboration with the University of Southern Queensland, and Queensland Murray-Darling Committee Inc (QMDC), completed a research and development project titled Integrating Paddock and Catchment Planning: a wool producer-driven approach to sustainable landscape management . The project was funded by the Native Vegetation and Biodiversity Sub-program of Land, Water & Wool, a joint initiative of Land & Water Australia and Australian Wool Innovation Limited.

The multi-disciplinary ecological, social and economic research provides woolgrowers, their organisations and regional Natural Resource Management bodies with a basis for land use planning from paddock to sub-catchment scale. The primary development aspect was a Toolkit to assist woolgrowers gather and collate resource condition information for Catchment planning, to achieve profitable and ecologically sustainable wool production. While this site was specifically developed for woolgrowers in the Traprock region (west and north-west of Stanthorpe, QLD), the Toolkit was designed to be adaptable by woolgrowers and Natural Resource Management organisations in other regions.

The natural environment underpins every primary producer business. This Toolkit provided techniques and information to enable both monitoring and land use planning at a catchment and property level.

 

A primary goal of the LWW Biodiversity Project was to encourage landholders to assess their natural resource condition and to provide a means of doing so.

The benefits of monitoring natural resource condition on property were:

  • More efficient use of pasture and therefore greater productivity
  • Improved weed and pest control
  • Information for property and catchment planning
  • Early warnings on changes in production ecosystems
  • Personal satisfaction from having particular native plant and animal species

In addition, it was anticipated that results from monitoring could be part of a quality assurance and labelling process which would in turn boost market access and prices.

Traprock members, could log in to:

  • Set up a property profile
  • Download forms and a Glovebox Guide and start monitoring paddocks
  • Contribute data to a pool of information that showed what was happening, in aggregate, in your region.
  • View data from the regional monitoring sites for pasture and water quality.
  • Contribute to bird sightings in the region.

Other members and visitors could log in and see a sample property and monitoring data; the monitoring forms and field guides used to collect data; and sample regional data. You could also access advice from the project team members on adapting a similar toolkit for your region.

 

In developing the Toolkit for the Land, Water & Wool project, the project team carried out substantial research including ecological studies of vegetation and invertebrates to assess biodiversity and vegetation condition, two social analyses of landholder perspectives on biodiversity and production, and modelling of the financial returns from various management decisions.

As a result of the research, a framework for undertaking pasture and habitat condition was developed and monitoring and the reporting of consequent results occurred.

The flow chart below shows how the project elements fitted together.

There were a number of stages which made up the development of the Toolkit for the Traprock project.

  • Social Science
  • The Ecology
  • The Economics
  • Monitoring Tools
  • Land Use Planning
  • Regional Monitoring