The Landholders Driving Change project is focusing on the Bowen-Broken-Bogie catchment (BBB) near Collinsville due to the high levels of sediment it delivers into the Great Barrier Reef lagoon.
Studies have found that some of this sediment is deposited close to the estuary, but a large proportion of the material delivered from the BBB is very fine, which can be carried long distances in flood plumes and is resuspended by winds and tides.
This creates turbid water that restricts the sunlight much-needed by seagrasses and corals, and the many species of fish, birds and mammals that rely on them.
This fine sediment comes from a relatively small proportion of the BBB – soils that are vulnerable to erosion and well-connected to the stream network through gully features.
But we are still learning how to effectively control this erosion at property and sub-catchment scales, and that is one of the main things that the Landholders Driving Change project aims to address.
This project is unique in the way that we are involving the people doing the hard work to control erosion on the ground – the landholders – in the whole process, including design, planning and implementation.
We need their input as our ‘reality check’ against the science.
They are helping us answer all sorts of questions, including: Does the scientific evidence match up with local knowledge? Are the proposed solutions practical? How can we ensure that people will be keen to continue working on the solutions in the longer-term? What does success look like?
We have had a good mix of landholders, scientists and policy people at the workshops who bring expertise from every angle of the project. We are finding that this blend of perspectives is working really well to give us some new ideas, and different ways of tackling issues.
As the group gets to know each other, we are getting better at sharing information and being confident enough to pull each other up on the details! We have had plenty of feedback that people are enjoying working together. I hope that we can establish and strengthen ongoing interaction between the landholders and the scientists to ensure that future research is targeted and communicated to the right audiences, and has a better chance of being applied.
Before I started working on this project I had a reasonable theoretical understanding of sediment management in the BBB.
But after a few months, I have already learnt heaps about the practicalities of implementing some of the management practices on the ground, and the scale of some of the issues we are dealing with.
Most of all, I am hugely impressed by the area of land that people are managing and how much they need to know to keep their farms running sustainably!
