| |||||||||||||
David Tongway and Norman Hindley
Rangeland monitoring must address the needs of a broad client base, not just the current user. The types of monitoring data collected by the States and the Northern Territory overall have a moderate to high potential to identify indices of change in landscape function at the site scale. The capacity varies from State to State and also within individual indicators.
Considerable thought and research has gone into the selection of data type
and field protocols, but very little into using the data to derive critical
threshold values. However, the capacity to identify and specify critical thresholds
with the existing monitoring data set would appear to be possible by adopting
an appropriate interpretational framework. Establishing the changes in landscape
function in response to a change of stresses and disturbances, in the form of
a landscape function curve, is of paramount importance, if the issue of critical
thresholds is to be resolved. An example of such an exercise is described. We
recommend that the use of sigmoidal curves should be investigated because their
defining parameters intrinsically provide a number of values with high potential
use for the purposes defined in the Audit objectives for this project, and have
both intuitive and experimental attraction.
View or download this technical report: [PDF - 166KB]
Please Note: PDF files are in Adobe Acrobat Version 4.0 format. You will need a copy of Acrobat Reader in order to view them. Blind and visually impaired users can view PDF files using a tool available on-line from Adobe Systems that converts the PDF files on the fly to HTML.
|
|
| ||||||||||||||