Landscape Logic

Projects

Project 7 – Knowledge Broking

Mr Geoff Park, North Central Catchment Management Authority, Bendigo

Objectives: 

1. To ensure a shared understanding of project activities and purpose amongst Landscape Logic partners, and to manage an outreach program to regional organisations and key NRM stakeholders across Australia.
2. To support the translation of the activities and outcomes of the other Landscape Logic projects, initially to the six regional NRM partners, and then to other Australian NRM groups and relevant organisations.
3. To ensure that outputs and outcomes from all the Landscape Logic research projects are made relevant and accessible to end-users.

Aims

To get researchers and natural resource decision makers talking and help each to build an appreciation of their respective challenges and disciplines over the life of the Landscape Logic and beyond.

Approach

1. Communication and Knowledge Sharing: this will be achieved by developing information packages and services for people who are involved in improving how decisions are made in natural resource management.
2. Supporting Adoption: this will be achieved through training activities to make sure that new knowledge is incorporated into, and helps improve, NRM decision making.
3. Evaluation and Feedback: this will be achieved by developing and carrying out a program evaluation framework.
4. Support regular two way discussion between the researchers and end users from Catchment Management Organisations (CMO’s) through
   1. learly identifying the needs of the end users in the CMO’s, including who these people are, their roles, current approaches to decision making and preferred methods of knowledge acquisition and sharing.
   2. Understand and respect the networks that operate at the level of regional natural resource management to assist sharing knowledge generated through Landscape Logic
   3. Provide regular opportunities for interaction between researchers and regional partners in a range of settings including field days, seminars & forums, electronic discussion groups and meetings.

Outputs (what and when):

1. Training workshops and support for Catchment and Natural Resource Managers in the use of decision networks (with Project 6, March 2007 – March 2010) 
2. Outreach program to communicate with non-partner NRM regions and stakeholders (Ongoing)
3. .Material that describes the scientific ‘story’ emerging from Landscape Logic Knowledge Discovery theme projects in a range of forms (Ongoing)
4. Online mapping application to view spatial data and support a range of visualisation, analysis and communication tasks (June 2007)

Outcomes

Addresses Landscape Logic Objective 5, improved management and investment in natural resources through better understanding of response to management:

External collaboration and links

The Knowledge Broking project is connected with each of the Landscape Logic projects and regional NRM partners.  It will help improve how research and regional NRM partners interact to make sure that outputs from Landscape Logic are relevant and useful.  The Knowledge Broking project will also provide regular feedback from evaluation to projects.  Projects 1 - 6 will each make their outputs available to the Knowledge Broking project, and Projects 6 and 7 will collaborate to the develop and test decision support systems with the regional partners.

Scoping Process (how did we get here?)

The project proposal described here is the result of regular interaction between the Knowledge Broking Project Leader and Landscape Logic research and regional partners.  The Decision Network Workshops (with Project 6 and regional partners) between November 2006 and March 2007, as well as regular meetings, telephone conversations and emails with each of the partners, have helped to define the project outcomes. 

Click here to see the Knowledge Broking poster (pdf, July 2007).