Natural Capital Plan indicators

Indicator groups

Natural Capital Plan has seven indicator groups used for reporting the performance of a scenario. These are higher level aggregations of the 17 underlying indicators. Some indicators appear across multiple indicator groups.

Water quality

Fine sediment from hillslope erosion
Fine Sediment from streambank erosion
Fine Sediment from gully erosion
Dissolved Inorganic Nitrogen (DIN)
Microbial – Bacteria

Biodiversity

Wetland – Riverine
Wetland -swamps (Palustrine)
Wetland – Estuaries
Terrestrial – Woody vegetation

Land resilience

Fine sediment from hillslope erosion
Land resilience

First Nations

Direct engagement
On-country values

Social

Community engagement

Economic

Industry economic
Regional economic

Climate change

Carbon sequestration
Land resilience
Methane production

Indicator rationale

The indicators used in Natural Capital Plan are a pragmatic representation of the things that;

are often valued in considering Natural Resource Management investment programs,
can be significantly impacted by the on-ground Actions that are typically applied, and
can be derived consistently across large spatial scales from available data.

The following table summarises the indicators used in Natural Capital Plan (and groupings used in Action set up).

Group	Group rationale	Indicators	Indicator Rationale	Initial condition method
Erosion processes	Erosion processes are used to estimate fine sediment generation. However, addressing erosion processes will also significantly reduce loads of particulate Phosphorus, Particulate Nitrogen, and Particulate Carbon.	Fine sediment from hillslope erosion	Soil loss from farm land decreases productivity and some ends up as fine sediment pollution in streams and receiving waters.	For Qld Murray Darling Basin region and Reef catchments, eWater SOURCE modelled hillslope, streambank and gully erosion outputs are used. To estimate the contribution of hillslope erosion to fine sediment in streams a delivery ratio is applied. The SOURCE modelling on which this data is derived is conducted by the Qld Government.
		Fine sediment from streambank erosion	Impacts aquatic ecology.
		Fine sediment from gully erosion	Impacts aquatic ecology.
Water quality	Important for considering aquatic ecology impacts and human health (microbial)	Dissolved Inorganic Nitrogen (DIN)	Impacts aquatic ecology.	For Qld Murray Darling Basin region and Reef catchments, eWater SOURCE modelled dissolved inorganic nitrogen outputs are used. The SOURCE modelling on which this data is derived is conducted by the Qld Government.
Water quality		Microbial – Bacteria	Threat to human health	Based on the Qld government published spatial layers of intensive agricultural (piggeries and cattle feedlots) combined with the Baker et al (2016) method for predicting stream based microbial pollution.
Biodiversity	Maintained or improved biodiversity is a common goal of NRM work. In the absence of a simple to derive and broadly applicable measure, Natural Capital Plan uses the extent of remnant vegetation as a surrogate indicator for biodiversity.	Wetland – Riverine	Remnant vegetation has high biodiversity value.	Intersect wetland polygons (riparian) with woody vegetation.
		Wetland – Palustrine (swamps)		Intersect wetland polygons (Palustrine) with woody vegetation .
		Wetland – Estuaries		Intersect wetland polygons (estuaries) with woody vegetation.
		Terrestrial – Woody Vegetation		Intersect all non-wetland polygons with woody vegetation.
First Nations	Engaging with First Nations people on NRM issues is best practice	Direct engagement	Direct involvement in project design will provide project and First Nations benefits.	Proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Island Peoples (age 15+) engaged in employment, education and training (Australian Bureau of Statistics SA2 region)
First Nations		On-country values	Projects conducted on-country will provide greatest First Nations benefits.	Proportion of area that is part of the indigenous estate.
Social	NRM strategies often seeks to engage communities	Community engagement	Positive social outcomes where community is engaged.	Use the Australian Bureau of Statistics SA2 region SIEFA index of education and occupation. This index summaries variables relating to the educational and occupational aspects of relative socio-economic advantage and disadvantage.
Economic	NRM strategies often seek to support agribusiness	Industry economic	Value to landholder.	Uses the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics 10 year average (2012-2021) rate of return (excluding capital appreciation) for broadacre agriculture.
Economic	Regional Economic	Value to region	Use ABARE economic figures.	Uses the Australian Bureau of Statistics SA2 region SEIFA index of economic resources. Areas with higher scores have greater access to economic resources than other areas.
Climate Change	NRM strategies often include a focus on measures to mitigate or provide resilience to climate change	Carbon sequestration	Carbon sequestration is an important store of carbon.	Use the proportion of area with woody vegetation cover as an indicator of carbon sequestration initial condition.
		Methane production	Methane is a strong green house gas.	Recent beef herd relative to maximum beef herd. Uses the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics 10 year average (2012-20222) beef herd divided by the maximum beef heard since 1990.
		Land resilience	Increased cover will increase land resilience.	Currently uses recent changes in Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) compared to long term average as an indicator of how hard country is being run. In near future will transition to use fractional cover differential to represent the level of ground cover relative to long term average cover to represent how hard country is being run.

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