Some key concepts for monitoring Australia's arid and semi-arid rangelands.

Abstract

Both the structure of rangelands and the way they function are characteristically variable in space and time. The landscape is patterned on a series of scales; land systems, land units, erosion cells, grazing effects, distribution of individual plants and microtopography an impinge on the way we decide to monitor changes in vegetation and soils. Temporal variability also occurs at a number of scales and these will affect both the type of data that we collect and the way we interpret them. Spatial and temporal variability in combination determine our view of the processes which operate in the rangelands and the models we use to describe them. New models may lead to a different approach to monitoring.