Landscape design for maintaining ecosystem services in tropical agricultural landscapes

Citation

Land & Water Australia. 2009. Landscape design for maintaining ecosystem services in tropical agricultural landscapes. [Online] (Updated April 23rd, 2009)
Available at: http://lwa.gov.au/node/3262 [Accessed Tuesday 26th of April 2011 06:41:45 AM ].

This project aims to improve understanding of relationships between vegetation pattern and quality of ecosystem services in Australia’s monsoonal tropics.

The project will establish a large scale experiment to measure responses of ecosystems and their services to different configurations of retained native vegetation by taking advantage of investments by government and regional landholders in establishing an adaptive management framework to direct agricultural and other development in the Daly River region of the Northern Territory.

Expected project completon date: June 2009

Outcomes

1. To relate present configurations of retained vegetation - ranging from uncleared to highly fragmented - to measures of patch condition (vegetation structure, fire incidence and damage, weed and exotic animal invasion) to distribution and relative abundance of fauna (birds, small mammals, herpetofauna, some macroinvertebrates)

2. To apply these data to design agricultural landscapes thought capable of retaining their character over the long term and supporting important elements of the regional fauna.

3. To implement these designs in collaboration with landholders and regulatory authorities.

4. To measure responses of these landscapes across several dimensions, including changes in faunal composition and in the condition of retained vegetation at the patch, property and sub-regional scales.

5. To measure costs of maintaining different configurations and relate these to conservation performance.

6. To link these studies to longer-term examination of trends in quality of ecosystem services across the region, considering production, conservation and Indigenous values.