Get reliable science

A relatively short history of systematic rangeland monitoring in Western Australia, spanning about one third of the pastoral industry's existence, has led to the current state wide program, known as the Western Australian Rangeland Monitoring System (WARMS). The pre-cursor to the current system began in the 1950s and was focused on assisting individual pastoralists set appropriate stocking rates. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the additional objective of providing information on the state's natural resource base was added following growing realisation of widespread land degradation and the necessity for government land administrators to track change. Several techniques were trialled through the 1970s leading to a regional scale system in the early 1980s, which proved too ambitious. A revised system was developed in 1992 and fully installed by 1999. This is the Western Australian Rangeland Monitoring System (WARMS), a ground based system comprising 1,622 sites.