PLANT MORPHOGENESIS FOR SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT OF RANGE RESOURCES 



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tivity be ensured by manipulating intensity of 

 use, season of use, and distribution of stock and 

 kind and class of animals, according to ecologic 

 principles. Burning, chemical spraying, and 

 mechanical clearing are violent tools which bring 

 about drastic changes in the ecosystem. More 

 often than not, the need to resort to them is 

 brought about by poor grazing management. 



Fire seldom is used or recommended as a 

 management tool for Australian ranges because, 

 under an erratic rainfall regime, a burnt area 

 may remain bare, unproductive, and susceptible 

 to erosion for long periods. Burning is used on 

 spinifex communities, particularly in areas of 

 reasonably reliable rainfall. Here the main fuel 

 is coarse, unpalatable spinifex, and the areas 

 are revegetated within a reasonable period (&£). 



Selective herbicides have not been used to con- 

 trol undesirable species on Australian range- 

 lands, probably because of the high costs and 

 the large areas involved. For the same reasons, 

 the use of mechanical methods for clearing tim- 

 ber on the rangelands has been limited except 

 near the higher rainfall margins where the re- 

 sponse in terms of increased forage is greater. 

 Little use has been made of pitting, furrowing, 

 water spreading, and range reseeding, although 

 there is considerable interest in them. Very vari- 

 able responses have been obtained where they 

 have been tried, partly because of the vagaries 

 of climate, but partly because insufficient atten- 

 tion has been paid to selecting the right tech- 

 niques for particular situations and the best sites 

 on which to start. 



Ecological management of the composition of 

 range plant communities by manipulating var- 

 ious aspects of grazing use (intensity of grazing, 

 season of use, and so forth) is generally the 

 cheapest form of management to apply. How- 

 ever, because of the wide range in kind and de- 

 gree of possible practices, and the slow nature of 

 the response, it is often difficult to give precise 

 prescriptions. The effectiveness of grazing man- 

 agement, in manipulating the kind and amount 

 of vegetation, depends on the degree of animal 

 control available to the operator. For maximum 

 efficiency, the operator needs to be able to graze 

 plant communities individually, and to get the 

 desired grazing pressure evenly distributed over 

 the area. Thus, management through control of 



intensity of use and season of use is likely to be 

 more effective on the more intensively developed 

 United States rangelands than on the very ex- 

 tensively managed Australian rangelands. In 

 many Australian situations, additional fencing 

 and water supplies, and possibly extra labor, 

 would be needed, and these may be economically 

 impracticable. However, strategies involving 

 grazing management should not be dismissed in 

 Australia because they could be effective in 

 many situations, even with the existing degree 

 of stock control. 



Management Strategies For Australian 

 Rangelands 



With such a large and diverse area, it is only 

 possible to consider management strategies in a 

 very general way, but it is possible to select some 

 as being appropriate and to reject others. Two 

 extreme strategies sometimes advocated — remov- 

 al of stock from the entire area and intensive 

 use followed by abandonment — will not be con- 

 sidered. 



The overriding factor affecting management 

 is climatic. The highly erratic rainfall, coupled 

 with the lack of winters cold enough to inhibit 

 growth, causes forage production to be highly 

 variable both in amount and season. Some form 

 of nomadism, moving stock to wherever forage 

 is available, would seem best suited to the situ- 

 ation (21, 30). The land tenure system precludes 

 true nomadism, but systems incorporating some 

 of its features are used and could be used more 

 widely. The important feature is flexible stock 

 numbers. One way of achieving this is for op- 

 erators to own several stations in different dis- 

 tricts, and move stock from one to the other, 

 depending on the forage situation. Stock can 

 also be sent to other areas on agistment. Another 

 practice is to reserve part of the property (gen- 

 erally a part with perennial grass or browse spe- 

 cies) for use only during long dry periods. An- 

 other possibility would be to establish State- 

 owned grazing reserves, which could be kept for 

 use only during droughts. Such reserves could 

 be established fairly easily in some of the sheep 

 grazing areas by the purchase of uneconomic 

 leases and might play a somewhat similar role 

 to Federal lands in the United States. However, 

 the success of the reserves would depend on the 



