Neighbourhood Catchments- Minimising the Impacts of Grazing in the Fitzroy Catchment

Summary

This project has proposed a new approach linking science and social science methodologies to encourage adoption and change. Two neighbourhood catchments (80-300 km2) were established to quantify the impacts of current management and identify environmental & social improvements to reduce the impact of land management practice on the Zamia/Mimosa Catchment (8 585 km2). We discovered that adoption of specific land management practices at the paddock to catchment scale could improve landscape health and water quality. 
Three main issues identified to address declining landscape and catchment health included a requirement to increase year round catchment ground cover, improved land management practices of fragile land types and greater awareness of catchment area impact on gully erosion. However, traditional techniques implemented to extend this information to the producer continued to demonstrate little or no uptake by the intended audience; a new approach was needed.