FATE has had a busy first half of 2006 and it's looking to get even busier as the year progresses. The big news is that we're very proud to announce the successful funding of two research proposals.
The Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC), through its New Animal Industries program have keenly jumped on board with a joint project between FATE and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) looking at marketing and consumer choice behaviour in relation to kangaroo meat. Kangaroo meat is increasing in exposure and availability in Australia's supermarkets and restaurants, but there has been little uptake of kangaroo in the smallgoods and meat manufacturing sector. This is in contrast to export markets such as Russia, which have found kangaroo to be a valuable low-fat component for smallgoods. FATE Program Manager Peter Ampt and UTS School of Marketing's Dr Kate Owen are heading up this investigation into what factors might influence consumer and meat industry choices around kangaroo.
RIRDC has also given verbal confirmation that it intends to fund our work with the Barrier Area Rangecare Group (BARG), north of Broken Hill in NSW's semi-arid rangelands. The funding on this occasion will come through RIRDC's Wildlife and Rangelands program as of July 2006 and will look at the kangaroo industry from the production end, encouraging landholders to take up a greater role. It is hoped that a more flexible regulatory approach to kangaroo harvesting will give landholders a greater ability to incorporate kangaroos into their property management strategies and derive a return from kangaroos harvested on their properties. This could lead to improved conservation outcomes for the rangeland habitat that supports those kangaroos, as well as sustainable economic outcomes for pastoralists looking to diversify their incomes.
Also keep an eye out for a FATE article on kangaroo management that we hope will be appearing in the June issue of Australian Zoologist. For more details on FATE's work on kangaroo issues, check out www.fate.unsw.edu.au/detail/kangaroos.htm
Prime kangaroo habitat in the rangelands of Fowlers Gap Arid
Zone Research Station, western NSW. Could kangaroos represent a sustainable
economic resource base for landholders in Australia's semi-arid and arid rangelands?
Of course, as usual there are plenty of other projects on the boil, many of which aren't based around kangaroos, believe it or not. FATE has continued working closely on models for greater collaboration across properties following a "conservation commons" approach. Peter Ampt will be presenting a paper at an International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP) conference in Bali in June on the role that common property arrangements might play in achieving systematic landscape change in Australia. This sort of collaboration forms an important component of the BARG project as well as having potential applications in the more heavily modified environments of the sheep/wheat belt and irrigation zones. An abstract of the paper can be found at www.fate.unsw.edu.au/detail/commons.htm
Landscape in Australia's highly productive cropping zone featuring
massive loss of native vegetation, widespread erosion, loss of biodiversity
and unknown impacts on salinity and water quality downstream (Photo: National
Library of Australia). Is there a role for common property approaches to play
in systematically changing the nature of this landscape across property boundaries?
FATE has formed a partnership with AEMS Farm Solutions to explore how common resources such as kangaroos, corridors of native vegetation or waterways could be managed jointly across property boundaries whilst still allowing property owners to individually manage their conventional enterprises such as sheep grazing or cropping. AEMS is a private company that develops internet-based environmental management packages for landholders featuring both textual components and mapping using geographic information systems (GIS). FATE is exploring the potential for such a management system to operate across several properties and enable landholders to jointly undertake native species harvesting, bid for Government conservation funding and participate in newly developing markets such as carbon trading.
If all that wasn't enough, FATE has also been incorporating a monitoring component into our work on kangaroos and common property, particular aimed at delivering a tool which landholders can use to quickly and easily to gauge the results of their management activities and benchmark themselves against well-functioning landscapes. The tool we're exploring to achieve this is Landscape Function Analysis (LFA), the result of many years of work led by David Tongway at CSIRO. FATE is working with David to apply LFA in new and exciting situations and get a stronger sense of what measurable impacts we might be able to detect from changes in land management.
In you're interested in any of the projects discussed here, check out www.fate.unsw.edu.au/detail/index.htm for more information or drop us an email at p.ampt@unsw.edu.au
The FATE Team
Peter Ampt and Alex Baumber
For previous FATE news, have a look at the October 2005 FATE Newsletter
Last Updated 15 May 2006
