INTRODUCTION
The survey of Land Management Practices in the Great Barrier Reef Catchments is the third ABS survey to collect information using a spatial, land-based area frame. The unit surveyed is a physical land holding, which has been aggregated from land parcels under common ownership or management within the region. The advantage of this unit is that it can be used as a spatial building block to integrate other information related to that piece of land. The methodology also supports a diversity of spatial outputs, allowing the data to be presented in different ways.
The survey collected information from the land owner and/or manager of the holding on a range of land management practices applied to agricultural land. These were soil testing, fertiliser use, chemical use (including weed, pest and disease control), riparian management, surface water management and irrigation water management. Information was also collected on practices specific to particular agricultural activities.
The information in this release covers 28 of the 30 catchments draining into the Great Barrier Reef lagoon. Two catchments in the Cape York NRM region have been excluded because they have minimal agricultural activity.
In this release, the data is published for the 28 river catchments and for five Natural Resource Management (NRM) regions. Key features of each catchment region are discussed, and a map is included showing the location of each catchment within a NRM region. There are also a series of maps at the end the commentary that spatially represent some of the published data as well as a series of 12 tables provided as spreadsheets.
A more detailed release of data from this survey is expected to be published in March 2010.
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