ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the methods used in Australia with an emphasis on the concepts involved rather than the detail of their use. It presents research information that impinges on the concepts and methods of assessment. In the Northern Territory a climax-based approach to range condition assessment system was developed in the 1970s and subsequently applied to over 200 permanent sites on a group of cattle stations in central Australia. Range condition methods in general produce scores of “condition", which may be roughly in rank order with our visual assessment of change. Assessment provides the information on which the success of current management may be gauged, and new management procedures applied. R. B. Hacker has used the reciprocal averaging procedure to produce simultaneous ordinations of sites and species in arid zone communities in Western Australia. The site ordination defines a gradient of grazing pressure and the species ordination defines the species changes that characterized that gradient.
