Lynn Brake

Natural resources management arrangements in the Lake Eyre Basin: An enabling environment for community engagement?

Abstract An overview of the formal institutional arrangements for natural resource management (NRM) in the Lake Eyre Basin (LEB) and the role of these arrangements as an enabling environment for community engagement in NRM constitute our broad research focus. The appropriate scale of NRM management and the complexity and expense of effective community engagement are discussed. The research highlights challenges faced by NRM groups in remote regions and their need for proper support and sharing in significant decision making processes. Regional interface groups are presented as relatively recent experiments in ecological intervention within a rapidly changing policy environment. The study concludes with a summary of key challenges for NRM engagement in the LEB region and suggests that interface organisations require understanding, capacity and support to learn how to improve, adapt and meet the challenges of their operating environment.

Description, history, and water chemistry of the recently restored watervalley wetlands in the Southeast of South Australia

The southeast of South Australia has a history of drainage of wetlands to increase the amount of land available for agriculture. Recently, some landholders have reversed this trend by restoring the wetlands on their land to provide habitat for wildlife. The Watervalley Wetlands are the most extensive of these restored wetlands. The water is high in nutrients, hard, alkaline, and variably saline. The salinity of these wetlands varies in both time and space. Seasonal variations in salinity within the wetlands are conducive to high productivity, and the variation between wetlands ensures diversity of habitat. However, careful monitoring is required to determine whether the observed seasonal cycles of rising and falling salinities will continue or whether salinity will increase to undesirable levels at some time in the future. Long-term monitoring is also necessary to determine whether the present high productivity will continue under the prevailing water regime or whether that productivity is an artifact of the recent restoration.