One month in the life of Landscape SA
Managing the Whole Landscape: The Coordination Behind Caring For Land, Water & Nature
From weeds and waterways to biodiversity, farming and emergency biosecurity, effective landscape management depends on coordination across agencies, landholders and communities.
Landscape management is often most visible at ground level: a landholder controlling weeds, a community group revegetating a waterway, a field ecologist checking habitat or a farmer improving a dam. Behind those practical actions, however, sits a far more complex system of planning, regulation, monitoring, education and coordination.
The work of South Australia’s Northern and Yorke Landscape Board illustrates the scale of that task. Its responsibilities extend across land, water, pest management and biodiversity, connecting issues that do not respect property boundaries or neatly align with a single organisation’s remit. Managing them requires not only ecological knowledge, but also governance, communication and the ability to coordinate action across public and private land.
That complexity begins with the landscape itself.
A weed growing on one property can spread beyond a fence line. A pest animal can move across farms, conservation areas and adjoining districts. Rivers cross ownership boundaries, while floodplains, native vegetation and wildlife habitats function as connected systems rather than individual parcels of land. Effective management therefore depends on people making decisions with a broader landscape in mind.
The Northern and Yorke Landscape Board’s activities demonstrate how varied those decisions can be. Current work ranges from controlling declared weeds and coordinating fox management to monitoring threatened species, improving farm dams, supporting waterway restoration and preparing landholders for potential locust activity.
Each issue calls for a different combination of regulation, science, local knowledge and practical action.
Declared weeds are one example. While many unwanted plants may simply be regarded as a nuisance, declared weeds carry legal responsibilities. According to the Board’s information, the obligations can differ depending on the species and where it occurs, with some weeds requiring eradication and others containment.
That places a responsibility on landholders, but it also creates a need for agencies to provide identification, advice and compliance support.
Cape tulip shows why timing and local participation matter. The plant is toxic to livestock and grows from underground corms that can remain dormant in the soil for years. The Board is encouraging landholders to identify and control plants while they are actively growing, before flowering reduces the opportunity for effective treatment. Workshops provide another layer of support by connecting property owners with practical information about control options.
Other threats require coordination at an even wider scale. The Board’s Spring Regional Coordinated Fox Control Program is designed around collective action across the region, with chemical control supplied to landholders at a discounted rate. The rationale is straightforward: controlling a highly mobile pest on one property has limited value if surrounding areas are left untreated.
The same principle is evident in preparations for Australian plague locusts. Following favourable conditions, landholders are being asked to monitor likely egg-laying areas and report significant activity. Because the Australian plague locust is a notifiable pest, the response combines private observation with formal reporting and state-level biosecurity systems.
Landscape management also demands coordination when the issue is not a pest or threat, but the long-term health of natural systems.
The Gawler River Restoration Plan, produced by Green Adelaide with a range of partners, provides landholders with practical guidance for protecting and improving the river. The plan recognises Aboriginal cultural values, the need to connect vegetation, the importance of allowing the river space to move and flood naturally, and the role of open space in maintaining connections as
development occurs.
This approach reflects the reality that a healthy waterway is shaped by what happens both within the river corridor and across the surrounding landscape.
On farms, relatively small changes can also contribute to wider environmental outcomes. The Board’s work on farm dam enhancement encourages landholders to manage stock access, establish native vegetation and add habitat features such as logs and rocks. These measures can reduce erosion and pugging, improve water quality, limit evaporation and create habitat for wildlife. Importantly, the work is presented not as a choice between agricultural productivity and environmental care, but as management that can support both.
The breadth of these programs also shows why landscape governance cannot be delivered by government alone.
Community groups, primary producers, researchers, First Nations partners, volunteers and specialist agencies all contribute. Waterbug BioBlitz events, for example, involve participants working with aquatic ecologists to sample macroinvertebrates and test water quality, with the information contributing to long-term monitoring. Researchers from Flinders University are involved in monitoring pygmy blue-tongue lizards, while the Board’s First Nations Partnerships team brings cultural knowledge and relationship-building into the organisation’s work.
Funding mechanisms provide another part of the system. Bite-sized Grants support community and not-for-profit projects such as weed control, revegetation and pest animal management, while Grazing Management Grants are intended to help primary producers improve grazing practices through fencing and water infrastructure.
Taken together, these initiatives reveal landscape management as an exercise in organisation as much as environmental stewardship. It requires governments and regional bodies to set priorities, administer funding, interpret legislation, coordinate pest control, support research, communicate emerging risks and provide landholders with practical information. At the same time, success depends heavily on people outside government choosing to participate.
The central challenge is that landscapes are interconnected while responsibility for them is distributed. A river, pest species, threatened animal or invasive plant does not recognise the administrative distinction between a farm, reserve, roadside or development area. Effective care therefore depends on institutions and communities finding ways to work across those divisions.
For regional landscape bodies, the task is not simply to manage individual environmental problems. It is to build the relationships, systems and shared knowledge that allow many people, working on many different pieces of land, to contribute to the health of the landscape as a whole.
