Today the Natural Resource Management (NRM) community breathes a small sigh of relief as they press “Submit” on their tender responses for the next five years, covering the latest round of the National Landcare Program funding (Regional Land Partnerships).

What do NRMs do? A great example from Rangelands NRM, one of our clients

We are a support organisation across the NRM community; we help primarily with the spatial side of their operations, through our support services and our GRID product.  GRID has been the subject of many blogs, so I won’t harp on about it (the “easy to use online GIS for the NRM community” tagline pretty much spells it out, too).

In this latest funding round we’ve been working with several of the NRM organisations behind the scenes helping out with developing their responses and providing different data products (like we blogged about at the end of last month) for our clients.  It’s been a busy time for them, so getting access to help on call when they need it has, I hope, been useful!

Screenshot from GRID showing the summary data for NRM regions

We’ve also been reviewing our ongoing support work for the NRM community and have proposed a few new things to assist them as a collective, including providing more services around GRID.  For example, the data refreshing that is currently happening via State NRM funding (like Chris blogged about recently) has been seen as very valuable, so we’re rolling that into the new support agreements, along with additional training sessions.  While we’re having to raise the support agreement costs slightly, they’ve been stable for the last four years, and we’re fixing them for our NRM groups for the life of this new funding round, so they have certainty.  Certainly the response has been supportive so far around these services.

We’ve also proposed a few other collective services to the NRM community – which I hope to be able to announce in the future once the grant funding has been confirmed!

Let’s hope that the new rounds of funding deliver the means for the NRM community to achieve their goals and to continue to connect communities, manage landscapes, help create sustainable agriculture and deliver healthy environments!

Piers

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