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Nyul Nyul people have lived on their country — around Beagle Bay on the Dampier Peninsula in the Kimberley region — for thousands of years in a deep relationship with the ocean, rivers, waterholes and Pindan bushland that sustain them. Wetlands are identified as being important not only as a water source for people and all life, but as a central part of the Nyul Nyul people’s identity. They are special places providing habitat for hunting and fishing, and supporting many different plants that are valuable as food, medicine, or materials. Wetlands are places of learning, family time and play, as well as being a source of memories from past times.

Since 2013, through funding from the Northern Australia Hub of the National Environmental  Research  Program  (NERP) and the Hermon Slade Foundation; researchers from the University of Western Australia, Griffith  University,  and  I-Tracker  staff  from the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance Ltd (NAILSMA), have been working with the Nyul Nyul Rangers to study the freshwater wetlands on Nyul Nyul country. The  Nyul  Nyul  Rangers  are  part  of the Kimberley Ranger Network, facilitated by the Kimberley Land Council, and are employed to manage their country.

Nyul Nyul Rangers and Traditional Owners are committed to the management of their country and invited the project team, including The University of Western Australia’s (UWA) Centre for Excellence in Natural Resource Management (CENRM) — with  ongoing research interests in river ecology and collaborations with Indigenous ranger groups  in the Kimberley — to work with them to better manage and monitor wetlands by combining Western science and their traditional knowledge. CENRM’s  Dr  Neil  Pettit — and colleagues Fiona Tingle, Rebecca Dobbs, Professor Brad Pusey, Dr Paul Close and Michelle Walker, along  with  Christy Davies  from NAILSMA — made three trips to Beagle Bay, each lasting about a week. The Nyul Nyul Rangers and research team worked together to sample a range of freshwater habitats across the Rangers’ operational area. This provided the opportunity for Nyul Nyul Rangers to introduce researchers to these freshwater systems, and combine scientific sampling of baseline data with Indigenous ecological knowledge, to gain a broader understanding of the biodiversity and pressures/threats to these  systems.

During their expeditions to the Kimberley, the research team, comprised mainly of freshwater ecologists, learned a great deal from the Nyul Nyul men and women.

“They had so much knowledge they wanted to share and were keen to educate Western scientists in the importance of acknowledging cultural values. The area is full of special sites and important animals for them. Some of the wetlands are ground-water fed and have water there all year round,” Neil Pettit said.

The team learnt that the Nyul Nyul  people were worried about the future of their wetlands; and particularly concerned about how the development of water resources in the region — one of the key pressures across the northern Australian landscape — would take away the water from their waterholes. To address concerns about the potential negative impacts of future water demands, monitoring programs were established to allow the Rangers to assess changes in water quality, vegetation health, aquatic macroinvertebrates and fish communities.

By working together on country knowledge was exchanged, baseline ecological data was collected, and information about the wetlands documented. Sampling methods and monitoring tools were developed to provide the Nyul Nyul Rangers a means of detecting any change in the condition of waterholes over time. The collaborative approach to field work, as well as the integration of cultural knowledge and Western science, further developed the capacity of Nyul Nyul Rangers to manage country.

Developing these skills is important, as working at the landscape scale is difficult, across areas of mixed land tenure and management responsibilities. This means that Rangers need to learn how to manage different views about many factors, for example, fire management, invasive species management, stock incursions from other properties, allocating funding, building community capacity, and preventing the loss of knowledge through people leaving the region (particularly through staff turnover within the ranger group). There are also often competing views in communities about vegetation and animal management (invasive animals versus a food supply).

By working together, Rangers and scientists are continually learning about the Kimberley region; from its inherent and varied values, to how best to sustain them into the future.  It is a unique and expansive landscape, encompassing a large network of Traditional Owner groups, each with specific knowledge of the cultural and social needs underpinning approaches to environmental management. This knowledge is being shared in the wider scientific community, and capacity is being built within the Ranger group to share that knowledge. Rangers are now confident enough to deliver presentations at both international (World Indigenous Network conference, Darwin 2013) and national (Australian Society of Limnology and Australian Society of Fish Biology Joint Congress, Darwin 2014) conferences.

“There are women as well as men rangers. We were pleased to see that the young people have a strong feeling for their land. Our research in northern Australia contributes to the knowledge base, providing the science of wetland ecology as well as baseline data crucial in a changing climatic and developmental landscape,”  Neil said.

Developing practical tools to assist Rangers

CENRM has been undertaking ecological research and working with Indigenous people to help manage their lands in the Kimberley for the last eight years through collaborative initiatives such as Tropical Rivers and Coastal Knowledge, the Northern Australia Water Futures Assessment, Framework for Assessing River and Wetland Health and Northern Australia Sustainable Yields project. These programs have included numerous Indigenous Ranger groups, local communities, government agencies and scientists based at UWA, Charles Darwin University, Griffith University and CSIRO.

Research projects under these initiatives have included investigations into groundwater/ surface water interactions, environmental water requirements of aquatic biota, food webs, and the development of tools and processes for identifying ecological assets and Indigenous values of water. This information has been used to develop a range of applications for planning, on-ground training, collaborative management and integrated on-ground management.

Rebecca Dobbs — a CENRM  researcher living and working in Kununurra — has coordinated the Waterways Education program since 2009. Developed as a collaborative partnership between CENRM and the Western Australian Department of Water, the program has built the expertise and capacity of local and regional communities to identify environmental management issues, implement standard ecological monitoring techniques, and integrate traditional knowledge and values into the broader management of natural resources across the Kimberley region.

The program was delivered using four key themes: waterways awareness, training, research and management, and long-term monitoring. These themes were developed following extensive consultation with stakeholders, and were designed to accommodate the unique capacity and requirements of stakeholders in the Kimberley, recognising participants’ existing skill levels, knowledge and needs, as well as having on-ground applicability and relevance.

The delivery of the program — through training, workshops, on-ground delivery and follow-up support — was highly successful and obtained the support of a large number of stakeholders from across the Kimberley, including government and non-government agencies, land councils, language centres, Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs) and schools. The program continues to contribute to the objectives of initiatives such as IPA planning  and management priorities under Working on Country Indigenous Ranger  programs.

Over time, the program has progressed from the initial focus on training in data recording and monitoring, to now producing a data analysis tool that enables Rangers and the community to assess the success of management actions and undertake adaptive management. The program also includes tools to assist in interpreting the information collected using an I-Tracker application created specifically for this purpose. The I-Tracker program (short for Indigenous Tracker) is an initiative of NAILSMA and was developed to support Indigenous land and sea managers in the collection, management and reporting of environmental and cultural data ( www.nailsma.org.au/hub/programs/i-tracker ); by using freely available CyberTracker software (www .cybertracker.org/software/introduction).

An analysis of riparian vegetation, for example, has been designed to calculate index scores for plant cover, regeneration and weeds. These scores are calculated and graphed automatically by a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that the Rangers copy and paste directly into, after extracting the pre-formatted monitoring data from the I-Tracker database. The selection of indices and calculation of condition scores align with Western science methods used more extensively across northern Australia. The visual representation of the data is represented by range bars to show the variation in scores.

This allows Rangers to track changes visually, and pick up significant changes at  a site that may warrant further investigation by examining the raw data, and also taking into account changes across seasons. With the ability to document changes, Rangers are better able to prioritise on-ground work, which is also important when developing funding applications.

With continued uncertainty, a lack of knowledge of the possible effects of a changing climate, and increased pressure for regional development, there is a need to strengthen ecological-social resilience in northern Australia. Ultimately, it is hoped that this work will contribute to collaborative management of aquatic ecosystems by developing methods that build on commonalities and differences between Indigenous and Western science understanding of these ecosystems. This approach will provide synergies of local knowledge and capability, management and environmental monitoring and research and ensure it is relevant and acceptable to all stakeholders.