Research across a vast landscape

Our research program was driven by the need to make tropical savannas research more useful to research users and by two major factors:

• There are and will continue to be, increasing pressures to develop and intensify the use of natural resources in northern Australia. This will come from both entrepreneurial investment and existing enterprises wishing to increase productivity
• It is far less costly in public and private terms to maintain and protect the environment than it is to renew and restore it after it has been degraded.

One of the reasons people value the tropical savannas is that they still retain many of the natural and cultural values that have been lost in southern Australia—the flip side of this situation is that the low population of the tropical savannas makes it difficult to develop a "critical mass" of researchers in many disciplines.

The Tropical Savannas CRC helped to overcome this problem by creating projects that brought together researchers from its 16 partner agencies spread across Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

The TS-CRC was well placed to take a whole-of-savannas view of land-management research and to link researchers from different sectors (e.g. pastoral and conservation); from different disciplines (e.g. biophysical scientists and ethno-ecologists) and different states and territories.

In this way the research carried out by the Centre added value to the research carried out by our partner agencies.