About us
Landscape Logic is a research hub under the Commonwealth Environmental Research Facilities scheme, managed by the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts. It is a partnership between six regional organisations, five research institutions and state land management agencies in Tasmania and Victoria.
The aim of Landscape Logic is to improve the way decisions are made about land use and the resulting effects on water and vegetation.
Landscape Logic is focusing on two major knowledge gaps in the current regional investment process.
- Finding better ways to organise existing knowledge and assumptions about links between land management actions and environmental outcomes.
- Improving our understanding of these links through historical studies of the effects of past private and public investment on environmental condition in two areas – water quality and native vegetation condition.
In taking this approach, Landscape Logic is attempting to move from a linear, issue-by-issue decision-making approach with many hidden assumptions to a networked approach that makes social and biophysical causal links and assumptions explicit. The challenge is to incorporate assumptions and uncertainties into a workable framework that can be used by catchment managers faced with multi-million dollar decisions about where and when to invest for the best overall environmental outcomes.
Decision networks will be developed with each of the regions involved in Landscape Logic with the aim of improving future rounds of investment plans. To establish causal links and improve the quality of information in those decision networks, we will conduct historical studies that examine relationships between past changes in land use and land management practices, and water quality and vegetation condition. Using spatial information and social surveys in multiple-case study areas, time series and space-for-time landscape scale experiments will be conducted to examine links between private and public investment and changes in environmental condition along with other drivers of environmental change such as climate, changed fire and grazing regimes and land tenure change.
