Land

Native vegetation

About the Biodiversity Benefits Framework

Note: this information is also Appendix 1 of the case studies

One of the objectives of programs such as the Natural Heritage Trust is to improve biodiversity by supporting activities that enhance native vegetation such as tree planting, weed removal and fencing of native bush to control grazing. Are these on-ground activities useful ways to protect and improve biodiversity? How do we plan and implement new on-ground activities that are most beneficial to biodiversity? The Australian Government's Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts and the CSIRO, in consultation with the Biodiversity Task Group (established under the Natural Resource Management Standing Committee), have developed the following framework as one way of addressing these questions. This framework has two objectives to:

  1. Provide a way of designing a monitoring program to assess the biodiversity benefits of past and current vegetation enhancement projects.
  2. Provide a way of designing new vegetation enhancement projects that have clear objectives, clear expected outcomes and tightly integrated monitoring and assessment procedures.

This framework is not a recipe or an alternative to existing planning, monitoring and evaluation procedures. Rather, it is one way of working through the many complex issues involved in assessing the biodiversity benefits of past projects and designing new ones. The framework may prove useful for catchment authorities, landcare groups and individual land managers to:

These issues need to be worked through whether assessing the biodiversity benefits of previous on-ground activities or planning new activities.

Vegetation enhancements

In Australia, we generally accept that having trees and shrubs-particularly native trees and shrubs-in urban and rural areas and rangelands will create an environment that is better for living in than concrete or cleared paddocks and bare ground. As a result, and thanks to billions of dollars and much enthusiastic toil, many millions of trees, shrubs and grasses have been planted or protected from grazing in the last ten to twenty years, as part of Landcare and other community vegetation projects. A useful overall name for these activities is 'vegetation enhancement'.

Vegetation enhancement includes those on-ground activities that:

Other activities

Many policies and processes are of benefit to biodiversity but are not termed 'vegetation enhancement'; for example:

  • selection and acquisition of conservation reserves.
  • social and institutional processes (e.g. incentives) supporting on-ground actions.
  • regulations to control land uses.

These policies and processes are essential in supporting and improving the benefits of on-ground activities that enhance native vegetation.

Years of work: what are the outcomes?

With the next phase of the Natural Heritage Trust (NHT) just beginning1 (NHT2), it is timely to visit completed vegetation enhancement projects, and see what they have achieved.

Once these questions are answered and the resulting lessons communicated, new projects should build on the successes of earlier projects and avoid repeating earlier mistakes. If we understand the benefits already coming from vegetation enhancement, we should have more realistic expectations of the benefits likely to flow from new projects.

Biodiversity Benefits

Biodiversity (a contraction of the words 'biological diversity') is often taken to mean simply the variety of life-forms in which living things exist, from DNA to whole ecosystems. Many discussions appear to consider that 'biodiversity' means only the numbers of individuals of the various species in an area. However, it is much more than that.

'Biodiversity' implies that individuals and species are distributed in ways that allow them to function sustainably. Even from the start of international concern for biodiversity (1986) it was noted2 that to understand biodiversity we must consider biodiversity composition (e.g. DNA, species or communities) structure (e.g. how species are arranged in space and time) and function (what they all do).

Therefore the biodiversity status of a place is a description of how 'liveable' it is, for both native and introduced species (including agricultural species) as judged by humans. It is an expression of the species that are there, and how well they are functioning or working together. By describing biodiversity like this, we can see that it is an abstract quality that can vary between places even if they are occupied by similar numbers of species.

Assessing the biodiversity benefits of vegetation enhancements is about measuring changes in those attributes of biodiversity people think important. This can include charismatic wildlife species such as birds and koalas, the structure or number of layers of vegetation in a woodland, or the health of trees and soils.

Figure 1

Figure 1

Why bother?

Vegetation enhancement activities will only be needed in areas where the status or condition of biodiversity is not as people wish it to be (i.e. biodiversity is in an undesired condition). Enhancement activities may help an area into a transition condition, and the activities will be intended to bring biodiversity of an area ultimately to a preferred condition or state. Figure 1, which represents the 'State and Transition' concept, devised by Westoby and coworkers,3 is one way to think about why develop and implement an enhancement activity. Setting clear goals and objectives is fundamental to the following four-step process for improving and assessing biodiversity benefits. Setting clear objectives requires describing the characteristics of the current undesired state of biodiversity, and deciding how to make a transition to a preferred state of biodiversity or the environment in general.

Assessing biodiversity benefits via four steps, in a framework

In response to a request from the Biodiversity Benefits Task Group, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems has proposed a four-step assessment process that can be used to design ways to identify the benefits of vegetation enhancement activities anywhere in Australia and at any scale.

Whether a project is in progress, already completed, or being planned, the draft four-step process allows a user to examine the effects a project has had or is likely to have on biodiversity. Inputs and objectives can be listed and discussed in the light of the actual or predicted outcomes for biodiversity, at local, landscape or regional scales. The four steps can be used to decide how to go about monitoring and assessing the changing biodiversity of completed and current activities. It can also be used to guide groups developing and prioritising new projects. The four steps can lead a user to consider the biodiversity status of an area and how it can be brought to (or maintained in) a preferred state.

The steps are organised into a framework that has been designed specifically for use with vegetation enhancement work. It may also have application for assessing the benefits of other kinds of environmental projects.

At each step, the user lists observations appropriate to the 'questions'. For convenience the 'questions' are arranged as row and column headings in a table. Steps 1-4 are worded as if the project is in a planning stage. For projects that are complete, the user must apply the steps in retrospect. Steps 1&2 are about setting objectives and actions (planning), Steps 3&4 are monitoring and evaluation stages following from the previous two steps.

The four steps are based on several key questions.

First, what is the problem with the area in terms of biodiversity status? Why is it thought to be unsustainable or undesirable in its present condition or land-use?
Second, how could the perceived problems be fixed by management actions or changes in land-use? How long could the improvement be expected to last?
Third, if the new approach or land-use involves vegetation enhancement activities, what actual benefits could realistically be expected?
Fourth, how could the benefits be measured, in the near future and in many years time?
Fifth, how long are we prepared to wait for benefits to appear after our actions, before we choose some other management approach or land-use, or some other way of measuring benefits?

1 www.nht.gov.au/overview.html
2 Franklin J.F. (1988) In Wilson E.O. (ed.) Biodiversity. National Academy Press, Washington, DC, USA.
Noss R.F. (1990) Conservation Biology 4, 355-364.
3 Westoby M., Walker B. & Noy-Meir I. (1989) Journal of Range Management 42, 266-274.

Grass Trees of Mount Coryah, John Baker and Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts

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