Abstract
Assessment and reporting of changes in vegetation condition at site and landscape scales is critical for land managers, policy makers and planers at local, regional and national scales. Land management, reflecting individual and collective values, is used to show historic changes in ecosystem structure, composition and function (regenerative capacity). We address the issue of how the resilience of plant communities changes over time as a result of land management regimes. A systematic framework for assessing changes in resilience based on measurable success criteria and indicators is applied using 10 case studies across the range of Australia’s agro-climate regions. A simple graphical report card is produced for each site showing drivers of change and trends relative to a reference state (i.e., natural benchmark). These reports enable decision makers to quickly understand and assimilate complex ecological processes and their effects on landscape degradation, restoration and regeneration. We discuss how this framework assists decision-makers explain and describe pathways of native vegetation that is managed for different outcomes, including maintenance, replacement, removal and recovery at site and landscape levels. The findings provide sound spatial and temporal insights into reconciling agriculture, conservation and other competing land uses.
Highlights
Landscapes are dynamic through time, and changes can be efficiently tracked by monitoring the removal, replacement, enhancement or restoration of native vegetation cover
These regionally-distinct case studies demonstrate that the condition of vegetation at key points in time is an emergent property of economic markets, new technologies, the history of settlement, environmental constraints, government policies and programs and the impact of individual land manager’s practices and values. These studies illustrate the interaction of people living in, learning from and imperfectly adapting to their environment. We suggest that this systematic application of the Vegetation Assets States and Transition (VAST) framework provides rigorous and consistent information for land use planners, policy makers and land managers to design and apply appropriate interventions to improve the vegetation condition and delivery of a diversity of ecosystem services
We have tried to demonstrate that this kind of rapid, but repeatable analysis can help answer such questions as: What is the condition of the native vegetation at a site relative to an accepted national standard? How can one assess and report consistently and at multiple scales the condition of ecosystems resulting from management interventions? As a land manager, how can this knowledge be used to improve the condition of a site or landscape? These are questions that need a broad, consistent and historical approach to answering
Summary
Landscapes are dynamic through time, and changes can be efficiently tracked by monitoring the removal, replacement, enhancement or restoration of native vegetation cover Such dynamics are related to social, economic and political drivers, as well as environmental drivers, such as climate variation. Knowledge of how land management practices are used by local communities to modify and replace native vegetation over time, coupled with landscape genesis and climate variables, can be used to generate predictable pathways for native vegetation recovery (resilience) at sites and landscape scales [4]. This information provides a critical understanding essential for facilitating desired landscape scale change. We demonstrate and discuss the value of using a systematic and comprehensive chronology of land management practices and their impacts on vegetation structure, composition and function to document and illustrate the interaction of people
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