The rainfall experienced in Australia’s arid rangelands can be so unpredictable that remote-sensing methods depending on regular growing seasons to detect grazing impacts are ineffective. We tested two methods that assess ground cover in the wettest and driest years respectively, across a 32-year period, for detecting trends in impacts. Despite limitations created by spatial variability and small paddocks, the methods provide an objective means of assessing trends in management impacts independent of arid Australia’s erratic climate.

Adaptive, multi-paddock grazing may improve diet quality of livestock through managers moving livestock among paddocks, managing vegetation structure, and utilising differences among pastures to optimise diet quality. We compared diet quality of yearling steers by using this grazing system versus a non-rotational grazing system in semiarid, shortgrass steppe. We discovered that dietary crude protein was consistently 13–28% higher with non-rotational grazing. Differences were largest early in the grazing season and diet quality converged at the end of the grazing season. Managers applying adaptive multi-paddock grazing should be aware that lower diet quality can compromise livestock gains.

Preserving and restoring arid landscapes requires accurate monitoring to assess the effectiveness of management actions and identify degraded areas. Degradation of land by humans has put more areas at risk of soil erosion; three-dimensional maps generated using overlapping drone photographs are capable of measuring arid gully erosion as precisely as a 3D laser scanner. This finding greatly increases the accessibility of essential erosion monitoring for land managers, representing a far lower cost and less complex method than laser scanning.