The Natural Resource Management Planning Portal: Perspectives for NRM Planning and Reporting

Abstract

Natural Resource Management (NRM) is often conducted as a partnership between government and citizens. In Australia, government agencies formulate policy and fund implementation that may be delivered on-ground by community groups (such as Landcare). Since the late 1980s, over AUS$8b of Commonwealth investment has been made in NRM. However, quantitative evidence of environmental improvements is lacking. The NRM Planning Portal has been developed to (1) provide an online spatial information system for sharing Landcare and agency data; and (2) to facilitate NRM priority setting at local and regional planning scales. While the project successfully federates Landcare NRM activity data, challenges included (1) unstructured, non-standardized data, meaning that quantitative reporting against strategic objectives is not currently possible, and (2) a lack of common understanding about the value proposition for adopting the portal approach. Demonstrating the benefit of technology adoption is a key lesson for digital NRM planning.

Keywords:

• Catchment management
• community-based NRM
• citizen science
• Corangamite
• data standards
• NRM priorities
• Victoria
• web-GIS

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the coordinators and members of the 11 Landcare networks who contributed significantly to this project. Our thanks to Drew Collins for helping with figures. We would also like to thank four anonymous reviewers for constructive and helpful comments that improved this manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by Corangamite Catchment Management Authority.