Welcome to proceedings from Veg Futures 06 - the conference in the field.

Veg Futures 06 was a highly successful and memorable conference held in Albury-Wodonga on the New South Wales and Victorian border in March 2006. Convened by Greening Australia and Land & Water Australia, the conference brought together many of Australia's leading lights in NRM to share their knowledge. Over 500 people attended the four day conference.

The conference program was diverse. The much talked about 'Paddock Sessions' to local case study sites gave delegates the opportunity to engage with local land managers who are making the hard decisions about production and conservation. While a jam packed day of workshops covered in-depth a range of topics, from revegetation to market-based instruments, and colloquia sessions, exposed delegates to the best and brightest thinkers in the field of vegetation management.

Download the conference handbook here (2MB pdf).

Veg Futures structured a program around the five big questions confronting native vegetation management in Australia.

1: What is the role and value of native vegetation in the regional landscape?

2: Who pays for native vegetation management?

3: How do we balance conservation and production?

4: What are we doing about the threats to native vegetation (action and on-ground works)?

5: How do we know if we are making a difference (monitoring and evaluation)?

The final session of the conference gave delegates the opportunity to discuss how well we answered the big questions during the conference, to identify the gaps in our collective knowledge, and to debate future priorities for managing native vegetation at the regional level.

We would like to acknowledge the work of the Veg Futures steering committee, made up of representatives from the Joint Venture Agroforestry Program, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, the Australian Government Departments of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, and Environment and Heritage, along with Greening Australia and Land & Water Australia.

Carl Binning (Chief Executive Greening Australia )

and Andrew Campbell (then Executive Director Land & Water Australia )

Conference Facilitation

Veg Futures 2006 was facilitated by a team led by Mike Williams from Michael Williams & Associates, Geoff Park from the North Central Catchment Management Authority (Victoria) and Paul Ryan from CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems