In arid central Australia pastoral leases are very large (2000 –5000 km2), with large paddock sizes (200 –500 km2), are often poorly developed with few waters, and some stations remain largely unfenced. Although cattle spend most of their time within 4 km of water, it is not uncommon for more than 50% of station area to be beyond 4 km from water. This has consequences for carrying capacity and utilisation of central Australian stations. If paddocks are stocked to total area rather than watered area, this can lead to high pasture utilisation within 4 km of water and low animal performance. Cattle landscape use was investigated in the Paddock Challenge project (Materne et al. 2025) to help inform producers about future development options and to test current carrying capacity methodology assumptions. The study used GPS collars to track the location of 280 cattle in nine paddocks on four stations. In this paper we examined the locational data to see how water location influenced cattle landscape use. The data can be used to identify future infrastructure investment and adjustment of stocking rates to optimise landscape use, and cattle performance and production. Cattle spent about 70% of their time within 3 km of water and 90% of their time within 4 km, but this depended on pasture utilisation. The higher the pasture utilisation, the further cattle walked from water. This is consistent with the current Northern Territory (NT) long-term carrying capacity (LTCC) methodology, which assumes cattle use all the area within 3 km and half the area between 3 and 5 km. Information about cattle landscape use was used by producers to inform management and development decisions. The results highlight new opportunities for improving cattle management and addressing environmental, production, and economic goals on Central Australia's commercial cattle stations. The locational data will be further analysed to look at the effect of land type, fire, rainfall and seasons on landscape use and link landscape use to animal performance.
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