With all farming systems, we are dealing with ecological systems. Biodiversity is the basis of an ecosystem. In Australia LandCare is an organisation that works with stakeholders to preserve biodiversity.
The ecosystem itself provides the design criteria for man’s interventions rather than what is technically possible or economically feasible.
The appropriate time and space scales are those of the ecosystem rather than any human preferences. We don’t know enough about how an ecosystem will respond to changing circumstances. Most of the environmental learning needs to be done at the community level.
The power of Landcare has been in local people collecting and understanding information relevant to their land and their problems. Landcare facilitators tend now to bring information to groups and then let the group decide on its usefulness or relevance.
We should view our interventions as experiments where we do what we think is appropriate, then review it and analyse the outcomes we produce. Farmers need to build their capacity as a learning community and welcome challenge and evaluation.
The LandCare model in Australia does this at a local level and the pressures from neighbours on environmental issues cannot be ignored in the same way that an agency extension officer can. Demonstrations with leading farmers have replaced the formal experiments of research stations but the biggest challenge remains how to present highly technical information in a form that can be used effectively by community groups.
The term “biodiversity” is usually used to represent the variety of life; however the term has significant breadth. It can be considered as a concept, a measurable entity or a social/political construct.
There are three recognised levels of hierarchy for biodiversity-
- genetic diversity,
- species diversity and
- ecosystem diversity.
Each level possesses attributes of composition (the variety and identity of elements)
structure (the physical organisation of a system) and
function (involving processes like nutrient cycling).
The extent to which ecosystem biodiversity has declined is reasonably well documented.
Wetlands for example have lost biodiversity because of development for cropping, pasture, plantation and urban development.
