This section outlines the significant values, key threatening processes, priority management directions, medium-term (6-year) management targets, and potential delivery partnerships/collaborations for each of the region’s nine Local Areas.
The Mallee is a large and diverse region, encompassing the Murray River floodplain and associated waterways, vast dryland cropping areas, and large public reserves. Local Areas provide for this diversity by recognising the different landscapes, asset values, land-uses, climate, and communities influencing NRM across the region; and the different approaches that may be required to effectively manage associated threatening processes.
Each discrete Local Area landscape provides the basis for integrated and targeted action by considering interactions between assets, associated threat processes, and priority management interventions; at a scale that is meaningful to local stakeholders. Sub-management units are also identified for some Local Areas to recognise asset groupings/commonalities within the larger landscape and enable associated planning and delivery processes to be undertaken at the appropriate scale (Figure 40).
These Local Areas provide the foundation for the RCS’s integrated, place-based approach to priority and target setting; establishing the basis for co-operative local action, and ongoing discussion with associated stakeholders.
Within this framework, agricultural land (dryland and irrigated) is considered as separately as a dispersed local area, reflecting the similar asset x threat x intervention interactions influencing the management of these landscapes at the whole-of-region scale. Further differentiation of these landscapes is also supported by the establishment of sub-management units to recognise climatic/land system x threat process interactions within the dryland agricultural landscape (i.e. separated into northern, central and southern mallee); and to reflect individual bio-link corridors identified as priority locations for improving habitat connectivity (Figure 40).
Collectively, management targets established for each Local Area will also provide for delivery against the whole-of-region medium-term (6-year) outcome targets identified for our Biodiversity, Waterway, Agricultural Land, Culture and Heritage, and Community Capacity for NRM assets. Table 13 provides an overview of these interactions, with further detail provided for each Local Area in the following sections. A full list of the priority management directions identified for each Local Area to deliver against these targets is provided in Appendix 7.
