Precision Agriculture for Landscapes

Using precision agriculture technologies to manage landscapes, not just paddocks

Major sustainability challenges in agricultural landscapes include the loss of biodiversity, soil erosion and increasing rates of salinity. Historically, addressing these symptoms occurs at the paddock scale through a range of natural resource management tools such as devolved grant and incentive schemes. The scale of the paddock is generally the scale at which farmers are best placed to visualise, analyse and hence respond with appropriate management actions. Further, treating these symptoms at such scales can also provide paddock scale production benefits. This project aims to increase the effectiveness of farmer’s responses to sustainability issues by developing and applying tools and approaches that enable farmers to simply visualise, analyse and develop management actions appropriate to strategic landscape-scale priorities. The project will have a particular emphasis on the use of precision agriculture data to better information natural resource management decision-making at multiple scales.

Project Objectives

• Support farmers capacity to analyse and interpret the relationship between different spatial data layers (remote sensing and GIS) at various scales (precision agriculture data and landscape scale contextual data).

• To develop an approach for building regional scale maps of natural resource management priorities in collaboration with a regional NRM group (Wimmera CMA).

• To work with selected farmers from a leading farmer group (Birchip Cropping Group) to explore the use of precision agriculture data to inform their NRM decision making by synthesing local scale production data with regional scale priorities (spatial trade-off analysis).

Project Outcomes

• Influential farmers who are able to demonstrate the value of integrated sub-paddock to landscape thinking and action.

• Farmers who are better able to make informed decisions about the relative ecosystem and production values of different parts of their farms.

• Tools and guidelines for spatially identifying and evaluating areas of farm profit and ecosystem value.

• Improved regional scale biodiversity and environmental (water and salinity) outcomes.

Even when there is good information available on the ecosystem and production values of landscapes, it is not sufficiently integrated to allow complementarities and trade-offs to be examined meaningfully by farmers and NRM managers. If they are to make biodiversity decisions that affect the social, environmental and economic value of their farms, farmers require methods that enable them to quantify the extent and direction of these changes. Furthermore, farmers require methods to distinguish when and the extent to which individual action is able to achieve landscape scale goals. This project will provide the tools, frameworks and exemplars to enable such integrated assessment.

Funding & Collaborations

The research is funded by the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation and supported by the Birchip Cropping Group. A collaboration has also been established with the Wimmera CMA. The case study will be located in the Wimmera region of western Victoria.

Project Contacts

Andre Zerger CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems- Contact this person

Trish Hill CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems- Contact this person  

Alexandra Gartmann Birchip Cropping Group- Contact this person

Andrew Weidemann Birchip Cropping Group- Contact this person