Geoff Edwards
QASSMAC was a multilateral advisory committee animated by the soil scientists within the Department of Natural Resources. It set out to improve the management of these naturally occurring high risk soils. The State Planning Policy was identified as one of the main regulatory tools available. An early document was QASSMAC Acid Sulfate Soils Management Strategy for Queensland, April 1999.
State Planning Policy 2/02 Planning and Managing Development Involving Acid Sulfate Soils, November 2002.
SPP 2/02 Guideline: Planning and Managing Development Involving Acid Sulfate Soils, August 2002.
SPP 2/02 Checklist Form for Acid Sulfate Soils, June 2004. This was a precursor to Resource Planning Guideline E74: Checklist for Lodging Applications: Acid Sulphate Soils, March 2005.
General Information Required to Assist Assessment of Development Proposals
Involving Acid Sulfate Soils, June 2004. This was a precursor to Resource Planning Guideline E11, Referral Information Generally Required on Acid Sulphate Soil Matters, May 2005.
(Editorial footnote: Australian English uses the ph spelling for “sulphur” and its derivatives, but the scientific community has standardised on “sulfur”, so the scientists won over the policy officers when a new State Planning Policy on the prevention of damage from disturbing potential acid sulphate soils was formulated).
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Town planning legislation in the early 1990s (the Local Government (Planning and Environment) Act 1990) provided that the State Government could promulgate “statements of planning policy” which local governments as the local planning authorities would be obliged to incorporate into their planning schemes and development decisions. The first such instrument (which by s.1A.2 had the status of subordinate legislation) was aimed at protecting “Good Quality Agricultural Land”. This page revives a number of documents dating from 1992 on the subject.
First came a non-statutory “Planning Bulletin” in 1991. A great push came from the sugar millers concerned about the viability of the processing facilities due to declining acreages growing cane and the risk of falling below the threshold supply needed to sustain a profitable mill. In the friable vegetable-growing soils of Redlands, damage had already been done through existing subdivision policies that allowed for the creation of small 4 ha farms for strawberry growing. This size was admirably suited for rural residential housing so the inevitable happened.
State Planning Policy 1/92 Development and the Conservation of Agricultural Land. The policy was later supplemented by Planning Guidelines: The Identification of Good Quality Agricultural Land, January 1993 and Planning Guidelines: Separating Agricultural and Residential Land Uses, August 1997.
Land Planning Guideline E62 The Protection of Good Quality Agricultural Land, April 1998 – An internal procedural paper that was distributed to departmental staff but not brought to finality (evidence is the incomplete pagination).
Protecting Queensland’s strategic cropping land: A policy framework, August 2010.
After the Newman government came to power in 2012, it abolished the State Planning Policies. However, while the original SPP1/92 lapsed in 2012, the same principles were carried forward into the agricultural land component of the replacement generic SPP and have been incorporated into each planning scheme.
Guidelines for Agricultural Land Evaluation in Queensland, December 2015.
State Planning Policy July 2017, the consolidated policy of that period.
See also the dedicated page on coal seam gas and agricultural land.
A 5-page leaflet by Bill Thompson of LRAM consultants dated March 2012, shortly after the promulgation of the Strategic Cropping Land legislation, explains the history of the GQAL and SCL regulatory regimes (categories of cropping land).
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The Great Barrier Reef of Australia, 1926.
This gem turned up at a garage sale and seems worth preserving as a snapshot of official thinking at the time.
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This page accesses the findings of several programs aimed at capturing knowledge about the condition and trend of Queensland and Australia. However, for policy documents such as the Draft National Rangelands Strategy, see the website of The Royal Society of Queensland.
Here we will link documents published under the historical programs of the National Land and Water Resources Audit (NLWRA), the Australian Collaborative Rangelands Information System (ACRIS) and the Australian Terrestrial Biodiversity Assessment (ATBA), along with a contemporary program GEOGLAM. These studies are/were Australia-wide. QSN is hosting the materials on this Queensland site to secure their availability to the world, and because a member of a member body (The Royal Society of Queensland) was instrumental in establishing these initiatives.
Queensland
In 2004-5, the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines published three reports assessing the adequacy of natural resource information in the State. In graphic form, see this map of the datasets.
Natural Resource Foundation Data Capture to Support the Reef Water Quality Protection Plan, by Adrian Webb, 2004.
Natural Resource Foundation Data Analysis for Murray-Darling Basin, Lake Eyre Basin and Gulf Rivers Catchment, M.A. Sugars and P.R. Wilson, 2005.
Natural Resource Foundation Data Analysis for South East Queensland, M.A. Sugars and P.R. Wilson, 2005.
Australia
Lead author Col Creighton explained the origins and content of the NLWRA and Atlas to a meeting of the national Arid Lands Administrators’ Conference at Emerald, Queensland, 7-9 August 2002.
NLWRA (National Land and Water Resources Audit)
The invaluable resource of the National Land and Water Resources Audit can be explored via the web archive of Trove. The headline page captured on 20 July 2008 https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20080719224451/http://www.environment.gov.au/land/nlwra/index.html explains that it was funded by the Natural Heritage Trust . It was set up in 1997 to improve land, water and vegetation management by providing better information to resource managers.
The captured page National Land and Water Resources Audit Web Site indexes some of the descriptive information and analytical knowledge released by July 2008.
The Australian Natural Resources Atlas Australian Natural Resources Atlas was the web-based community interface to the information prepared by the Audit. It provided an extensive range of information across the seven key subjects. It was the repository of the entire suite of Audit outputs.
The rangelands-specific information has been re-published on QSN headline page: https://www.nlwra.scienceqld.org/.
In a separate QSN post, the waste and lost opportunity imposed upon scientists and the community generally by the closure of the Audit and related initiatives has been noted by the two principal Queensland-based leaders of the Audit initiative.
ACRIS
The rangelands-specific Australian Collaborative Rangelands Information System (ACRIS) derived from a proposal by the National Land and Water Resources Audit. Read more in a separate QSN post https://scienceqld.org/2024/07/05/2877/.
ATBA (Australian Terrestrial Biodiversity Assessment)
The NLWR Audit also initiated the Australian Terrestrial Biodiversity Assessment, as one of a series of assessments of natural resources under the umbrella title of Australian Natural Resources Atlas. Read more in a separate QSN post https://scienceqld.org/2023/11/16/biodiversity-asst-2002/.
GEOGLAM program
Around 2018 CSIRO and its program collaborators launched an interactive map and other tools to provide real time condition and trend data (monthly reporting) – including fractional differentiation of cover into photosynthesising vegetation (PV), non-photosynthesising vegetation (NPV) and bare soil with rangelands firmly in focus. Amazingly, it all launches on an iPhone6s proving that the Data61 hosting addresses access and operability issues of sophisticated systems that are often stymied by many factors (including people refusing to get new technology every couple of years to keep up with ‘security’ etc).
This rangelands-focused toolkit was funded out of the Australian National Landcare Program.
The GEOGLAM RaPP platform keys into user needs at the local level (500m resolution); scalable for global monitoring purposes, providing spatial and other data outputs.
1. Program
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/animals/livestock/RAPP-Map-GEOGLAM
2. Interactive tool here showing spatial extent of fractional cover (monthly) , rainfall (monthly) and a suite of other factors or attributes.
3. Explanatory document Monitoring groundcover: an online tool for Australian regions https://publications.csiro.au/publications/publication/PIcsiro:EP187950 or access the document via the QSN database.
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The accompanying story of Dr Geoff Monteith’s achievements in taxonomy (https://scienceqld.org/2023/11/16/palm-bug/) has prompted QSN to showcase a book by Steven Heard, Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider. https://scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/charles-darwins-barnacle/
Here’s the Table of Contents:
Preface (read it here!)
Introduction: A Lemur and Its Name
Chapter 1. The Need for Names
Chapter 2. How Scientific Naming Works
Chapter 3. Forsythia, Magnolia, and Names Within Names
Chapter 4. Gary Larson’s Louse
Chapter 5. Maria Sibylla Merian and the Metamorphosis of Natural History
Chapter 6. David Bowie’s Spider, Beyoncé’s Fly, and Frank Zappa’s Jellyfish (read an excerpt here!)
Chapter 7. Spurlingia: a Snail for the Otherwise Forgotten
Chapter 8. The Name of Evil
Chapter 9. Richard Spruce and the Love of Liverworts
Chapter 10. Names from the Ego
Chapter 11. Eponymy Gone Wrong? Robert von Beringe’s Gorilla and Dian Fossey’s Tarsier
Chapter 12. Less Than a Tribute: the Temptation of Insult Naming (read an excerpt here!)
Chapter 13. Charles Darwin’s Tangled Bank
Chapter 14. Love in a Latin Name
Chapter 15. The Indigenous Blind Spot
Chapter 16. Harry Potter and the Name of the Species
Chapter 17. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer and the Fish from the Depths of Time
Chapter 18. Names.
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Male Thaumastocorid bug from Norfolk Island. Anthony Postle, from fruiting inflorescence of Rhopalostylis baueri ©
Dr Geoff Monteith, a member of The Royal Society of Queensland since 1964 – nearly 60 years – with two co-authors has recently published a description of a species of bug endemic to the rainforests of Norfolk Island. The paper is titled:
“Hiding among the palms: the remarkable discovery of a new palm bug genus and species (Insecta: Heteroptera: Thaumastocoridae: Xylastodorinae) from remote Norfolk Island; systematics, natural history, palm specialism and biogeography.”
It is open access and can be downloaded freely from the doi address https://doi.org/10.1071/IS23040 (15MB) or from the QSN Database.
This latest publication is only the latest in a long string of Dr Monteith’s achievements in taxonomy. The ABC article https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-04/scientist-geoff-monteith-ranked-alongside-charles-darwin/12726162 is self explanatory and outlines the international recognition that Geoff Monteith has received for his entomological work.
Membership of a knowledge society reaps dividends
Dr Monteith joined The Royal Society of Queensland in 1964 when he first started work in the Entomology Department of the University of Queensland. In 2024, he will have been a member for 60 years. He has written “Most of other staff of that Department were members and we went to most of the monthly evening meetings…as a matter of course.” This observation is testament to the value of joining a scientific or natural history society. In 2021, his network with the Royal Society was able to support him in his fieldwork on Norfolk Island.
A world of invertebrates is waiting to be discovered
Steven Heard, author of Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider, https://scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/charles-darwins-barnacle/, the book referenced in the ABC article above, has authorised QSN to publish the following extract:
“There are far more insect species than plant species needing names: perhaps half a million living plant species (400,000 of them named so far) compared to—well, we don’t know quite what to compare it to. There are at least two million living insect species, quite likely ten million, and possibly as many as 100 million. Of course, only a little under a million of them have been described and named so far; but still, entomologists have had a lot to work with. Sure enough, at least two entomologists have joined the 200-eponyms club: Willy Kuschel and Geoffrey Monteith. …Willy Kuschel (1918–2017) worked in Chile and New Zealand studying the weevils…
“Geoffrey Monteith is the most recent name on my list of contenders, and the only one still active in science—and this makes his place in the field a bit surprising. Humboldt, Wallace, Pringle, and the rest have had a long time to accumulate eponymously named species. With the possible exception of Steyermark and Kuschel, they also worked at times when much of the world was just being opened up to Western biological exploration—exploration in which they all played notable parts. In comparison, Monteith is a babe in arms. He’s an Australian entomologist, born in 1942, but already with 225 species and 15 genera named for him. This avalanche of namings seems, largely, to reflect two facets of Monteith’s career. First, he’s been curator of two of Australia’s largest museum collections of insects and invertebrates, and in that position enthusiastically sent collections off to expert taxonomists who would sort and identify them—invariably discovering in those drawers and boxes species new to science, and often naming some of them for Monteith. Second, like Kuschel he collected thousands upon thousands of specimens himself, leading expeditions into the mountains of North Queensland and New Caledonia at a time when their faunas were virtually unknown to Western science—remnants of the scientifically untrampled ground the whole world had been when Wallace and Darwin and the Hookers were busily amassing their collections. As Monteith puts it:
I was a field-oriented biologist at a time when there were many unknown mountains to climb. I had a bunch of people over the years who absolutely loved, like me . . . busting our guts to get to new places, loved camping light to make room for collecting gear in our packs, loved squatting around a little fire under a nylon fly cooking our dinner while the rain sprayed in and soaked our bums . . . loved spraying mossy tree trunks and seeing an unknown fauna of tiny critters tumble down. . . . Every one of those very old tropical mountains in north Queensland had a whole unknown fauna of strange insects and arachnids. . . . And when we had almost exhausted those mountains the opportunity came to go to New Caledonia . . . and we found a similarly uncollected bunch of even higher, wet, tropical mountains stretching the 500 mile length of that bizarre and isolated island.
“Naming a new species for its collector is a common thing, and Monteith had the drive and the opportunity to collect a lot of new species.”
Now if that story doesn’t stimulate the reader to take up science or natural history and head bush, then join one of QSN member bodies and surround yourself with people who will inspire you to do just that.
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The Australian Terrestrial Biodiversity Assessment (ATBA) was a program of the pioneering National Land and Water Resources Audit and was driven by two Queensland scientists, Paul Sattler and Colin Creighton. The Audit ran from 1997 to 2008, but suffered an untimely end, chronicled in an article by David Marlow in volume 124 of the Proceedings of The Royal Society of Queensland.
The Australian Terrestrial Biodiversity Assessment 2002 combined the knowledge of State and Territory agencies on biodiversity and its management. It assessed the trend and condition of wetlands, riparian areas, threatened species, threatened ecosystems, birds, mammals and key values associated with eucalypts and acacias across Australia. The report identified threatening processes and conservation issues at a regional scale and made suggestions for improved biodiversity management.
The Australian Terrestrial Biodiversity Assessment 2002 has been captured (on 2 June 2011) by the National Library’s web archiving service in Trove:
https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20110602044946/http://www.anra.gov.au/topics//vegetation/pubs/biodiversity/bio_assess_contents.html, published by National Land and Water Biodiversity Audit. ISBN: 0 0642 3713137 7. (Home page was www.nlwra.gov.gov.au). The Age ran an editorial on the subject on 29 April 2003.
The Australian Natural Resources Atlas (ANRA) was developed by the National Land and Water Resources Audit to provide online access to information to support natural resource management.
The data were presented in the Australian Natural Resources Atlas as a series of IBRA (Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation of Australia) maps of bioregions (80 plus) and their subregions (384). These displayed the condition and trend of a series of biodiversity values and threats and their relative importance by a pie diagram superimposed on each subregion. Continental maps of distribution of various aspects were also presented.
The Australian Natural Resources Atlas is not to be confused with the contemporary Atlas of Living Australia, a repository for observational data, and which is no substitute. ATBA drew implications for policy and management from the information gathered.
Paul Sattler OAM, member of The Royal Society of Queensland, has written for QSN:
The Australian Terrestrial Biodiversity Assessment was commissioned by the Natural Land and Water Resources Audit and published in 2002. It represented the final report into the condition of a range of natural resources nation-wide.
It was presented in the format of a Summary report and an extensive data base on the Australian Natural Resources Atlas. It was a separate assessment under the NLWRA commissioned by the Minister, Senator Robert Hill, well after the other natural resources were underway.
The total Audit’s worth was in excess of $52 million including all partnerships, a not insignificant investment at the time. It is considered that the biodiversity assessment enjoyed at least $2 million of in-kind support from the states and territories in addition to the $1 million in cash provided by the federal government. The enthusiasm for a nation-wide biodiversity assessment was noteworthy.
Unfortunately, the opportunity for continuation of a program to assess and monitor the on-going condition and trend of Australia’s natural resources was not supported.
The framework to carry out a nation-wide biodiversity assessment within a constrained 12 month timeframe was the newly completed biogeographical classification of Australia by Gethin Morgan and others. The delineation of bioregions with their component sub-regions provided a practical scale to assess the condition and trend of biodiversity and the relative significance of threatening processes. This assessment also included technical contributions by CSIRO and State researchers into evaluating various taxa as examples of how biodiversity values could be further considered. The assessment relied upon the extensive information held by state and territory governments, with much data based on observational records.
Fourteen case studies on how biodiversity planning might be approached at a regional scale were presented. These case studies were stratified across dissimilar bioregions and subregions. Overall, the Audit’s assessment provided a valuable input for natural resource management bodies and local governments to consider in regional planning.
The nation-wide information collected by the Audit’s biodiversity assessment was used extensively in the preparation of the statutory Australian State of Environment reports over two reporting periods.
The Executive Summary (page V) identifies the range of biodiversity elements assessed. In hindsight, the significance of climate change did not receive the attention that it now demands.
Its existence and now ready access presents an opportunity for longitudinal assessment of biodiversity condition and trend at the landscape scale and the relative significance of threatening processes.
The Audit’s Assessment report on terrestrial biodiversity is linked below.
Paul Sattler OAM Co-author
Pages Intro – end are accessible via the Trove website https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20110602154342/http://www.anra.gov.au/topics/vegetation/pubs/biodiversity/bio_assess_audit.html
In PDF format:
Pages 1-29
Pages 30-50
Pages 51-75
Pages 76-104
Pages 105-end.
The data sets are available as a zip file and can be extracted in the form of Microsoft Access database sheets. To come.
The modern ABARES data repository via https://data.gov.au/dataset/ds-dga-d27ddf97-b437-451d-8b52-3079d44fae6a/ records datasets on this subject, but the direct link to ATBA seems broken.
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The Royal Society of Queensland collaborated with the SEQ Community Alliance to host a public event on Saturday 21 October to examine Queensland’s planning systems and in particular whether they are fit for purpose in an era of climate change.
In addition, the Society has opened the pages of a themed Special Issue of its peer-reviewed journal the Proceedings of The Royal Society of Queensland, which has been in continuous publication since 1884, to the subject.
Papers submitted for volume 133 of the Proceedings (in any one of a range of formats, not just research articles), prior to 31 December 2023 may be eligible for the $1000 the David Marlow Writing Prize.
See flyer for this event for more details. Background readings including the President’s introduction are accessible on the Society’s dedicated page. Presentations from the event are available on the SEQ Community Alliance’s webpage.
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The QSN website doesn’t normally monitor social media, but the risk of catastrophe in the gas fields through out of control wildfires is an issue that has not received much public attention. This article posted in QSN’s LinkedIn feed deserves wide publicity. For more information and for a regular feed of general science news, join the QSN LinkedIn account.
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The late Dr Jim Galletly, agricultural ecologist, earned his doctorate in 2007 for a study of the baseflow in the aquifers in the Lockyer Valley west of Brisbane and his research contradicted the conventional wisdom. An obituary and abstract have been published by The Royal Society of Queensland, in Volume 128 of its Proceedings.
In addition to that abstract, QSN has uncovered a summary of his doctoral research, with more detail than the abstract (there is a word limit for the Proceedings) and QSN is pleased to bring this teaser to a wider audience.
QSN has also uncovered a submission Dr Galletly wrote to the Grantham Flood Commission of Inquiry in August 2015: “The aim of this paper is to highlight the different approaches to science used in the physical sciences (and as applied in hydraulics) and in the biological sciences (as applied by those who are trained in hydrology which is a component of ecology). This may help explain why Grantham residents were not warned about the possible flood which caused so many lives to be lost.”
Appended to the submission is a statement of his credentials – a mini-CV.