Recommendation 1
Management focused explicitly on the creation of heterogeneity - ‘Mix it up/keep it messy’
Strategy
- Establish strategic alliances between CMA’s, local councils, agencies and business that enable the conservation of biodiversity at the regional scale using models similar to the Conservation Management Network.
- Promote the establishment of structurally and floristically diverse plant communities within revegetation planning.
- Promote the use of both high-density tree planting and wider spaced plantings to ensure structurally diverse revegetation (broad range of habitats).
- Promote the retention of habitat resources that accumulate over long time periods to develop greater diversity of habitat. For example, the retention of fallen timber and log hollows.
- Ensure that existing water-remote areas are retained for biodiversity conservation in the semi-arid zone.
- Explore the potential for closure of watering points, especially in the semi-arid zone, where this will produce sizeable tracts of land that are remote from water and domestic livestock grazing.
Recommendation 2
Re-design of land use for biodiversity outcomes
Strategy
- Promote and demonstrate the interdependence of agricultural production and biodiversity, based on the findings of this review.
- Provide information and assistance to landholders for paddock subdivision where land capability can be matched to land management units.
- Promote and demonstrate the rearrangement of land use for dual outcomes (production and biodiversity) e.g. fencing of riparian areas; retention of native vegetation for IMP, livestock shelter and crop protection; tree planting for shelter and carbon credit.
- Promote management that offers increased flexibility in response to changes in environmental conditions to minimise degradation. e.g. no-kill cropping and livestock trading.
- Develop incentive schemes by exploring local council and industry alliances to seek long-term financial incentives for agricultural activities that result in biodiversity gains at the expense of private profit.
- Promote current and developing financial off-set/stewardship schemes within each CMA area e.g. tree planting for carbon trading/offset; Enterprise Based Conservation.
- Employ multiple policy instruments (regulation, motivation, and economic incentives) to integrate biodiversity and production.
- Investigate the extent to which stewardship schemes may provide a better basis for public expenditure, in terms of landholder support and biodiversity benefits, than Exceptional Circumstances assistance.
Recommendation 3
Demonstrate and evaluate options for micro-restoration of highly modified landscapes
Strategy
- Promote the ongoing restoration and enhancement of native vegetation (paddock perimeter and corridor plantings) to ensure continued creation of habitat resources and more diverse age structure in vegetation.
- Promote the benefits of retaining paddock trees.
- Evaluate methods for paddock tree enhancement (e.g. enhancing connectivity, consolidation and enrichment of existing trees).
- Evaluate the biodiversity value of past revegetation activities by setting up monitoring for recent and past plantings (comparing perimeter plants, narrow spaced rows and single species tree plantings with tree plantings of varied species and structural components.
- Evaluate the biodiversity value of planting perimeter paddock tree in extensive croplands of Northern-western NSW.
Recommendation 4
Assessment of long-term impacts of high intensity short duration stocking on native pastures.
Strategy
- Support research aimed at evaluating the impact of high intensity short duration grazing regimes on landscape function, especially in the semi-arid zone.
- Continue monitoring of properties where high intensity short duration grazing is being practiced and seek additional co-operators.
Recommendation 5
Assessment of long-term impacts of high intensity short duration stocking on native pastures.
Strategy
- Adopt an adaptive management approach that treats new management options as ‘experiments’ where changes in biodiversity and other natural resource outcomes can be monitored and evaluated.
- Is it more important to manage biodiversity within the existing land use or to change the land use mix?
- What threshold of habitat fragmentation is beyond landscape self-repair? Is the 30% intensification/woody cover applicable for all agricultural landscapes (rangelands, extensive croplands and grasslands)?
- Support research projects that seek to quantify the economic and biodiversity benefits of changes land use patterns using production economic and biodiversity modelling techniques now available.
- Evaluate alternative biodiversity indicators of utility value to agricultural producers.