Abstract for presentation at The 13th Australasian Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Conference

The proposed State Rural Leasehold Land Strategy (SRLLS) is a potential major driver for vegetation condition assessment across Queensland. Pastoral leases cover 85 million ha and within the next 5 years, 60% of these will be up for renewal. Since three quarters of Queensland has a woody foliage cover of less than 20%, methods of monitoring the extent of groundcover (or conversely, bare ground) are required. Monitoring of groundcover is important since it is linked to indicators of soil loss, biodiversity, and pasture production. In some parts of the state, the achievement of gains in production has been matched by improvements in environmental condition indicators, however, in other parts of the state the environmental condition has declined. Many interlinked and usually compounding factors have caused this, some outside, and some within, the control of the state’s lessees. By building on the world-class SLATS archive of more than 1500 Landsat TM and ETM scenes covering the state with annual coverage or better from 1987, this project will deliver information on the condition and trend of groundcover over the past 20 years at better than paddock scale. By linking these results with climate and pasture growth models, the impacts and ramifications of management decisions on condition indicators can be assessed. This paper will discuss some of the challenges in deriving a robust product that is applicable across the range of cover types encountered in Queensland, and presents some preliminary condition and trend products.