The Centre for Bioregional Resource Management
plays a key role in contributing the applied research
and application development requirements for the sustainable
future of rural communities, land-uses and ecosystem function
to maintain productive resource bases, and biodiversity.
Bioregional Resource Management
Increasingly, we are beginning to understand
that productive agricultural systems, conservation systems
and Ecologically Sustainable Development must be planned
and integrated at larger spatial scales (catchments and
landscapes) in a way which will not undermine the capital
base of natural resources and productivity for future
generations.
Recognition of the need for bioregional
approaches has grown out of the multi-disciplinary areas
such as ecosystem management and landscape ecology.
In order to pursue a sustainable future,
human needs and activities must be reconciled and integrated
with broader scale ecosystem management that maintains
biodiversity and ecological services - towns, farms, forests,
pastoral land and fisheries belong on the same planning
grid as reserves, species conservation, water management
and land restoration.
The necessity for bioregional approaches
is also developing out of other natural resource management
areas (sustainable agriculture and rangelands), E.S.D.
policies and programs, Ecotourism initiatives, and Indigenous
cultural and natural resource management issues. Several
Federal and State government policies and programs are
now seeking to develop and implement bioregional approaches
and to coordinate existing programs on a bioregional basis.
The term Bioregion refers to
an area of land and/or water whose limits are defined
not by political boundaries, but by the geographical distribution
of biophysical attributes, ecological systems and human
communities. These are 'practical' domains for planning
and management purposes. Bioregions need to be 'recognisable'
environmentally and to the people that live there and
identify with them.
Bioregional planning is a planning framework
which allows for the variously defined and tenured areas
of land or sea within a bioregion to be managed in a complementary
way to achieve long-term conservation, resource use and
human lifestyle objectives. Future productivity from land
(& sea) will depend on how the entire landscape is
used and managed. This integrative approach to adaptive
management is Bioregional Management.
