Client Success Story

Statewide Approach to BushTenders™

Anne Buchan - BushTender Program Manager role in DSE.

There is over a million hectares of native vegetation remaining on private land in Victoria. Much of it is of high conservation significance for native flora and fauna and is important for salinity control, water quality, land protection, greenhouse and landscape reasons.

The management of native vegetation depends on the already substantial efforts of private landholders who are supported by a range of incentive and extension schemes. The BushTender auction-based approach is a new market based instrument (MBI) to target priority native vegetation and increase the level of landholder participation in conservation. Under the BushTender approach, landholders competitively tender for contracts to better protect and improve their native vegetation.

As the PlainsTender Project Leader for the Corangamite Catchment Management Authority (CCMA), Anne Buchan recognized the importance of competitive auctions for allocating public funds for biodiversity outcomes on private land and the need to undertake a systematic approach to their implementation. To meet this need, Spatial Vision was contracted to develop the CCMA's Conservation Tender Management System based on the BushTender approach to allocating funding by the Australian Government's Natural Heritage Trust.

Anne worked closely with Spatial Vision to design the Conservation Tender Management System to assist the CMA in managing their second tender process to protect native vegetation on the Victorian Volcanic Plain Bioregion. The system was developed to provide tools to support the management of the tender process from beginning to end including registration, assessment and bidding. Once the auction was complete, the system maintained a record of landholder contracts and their on-going reporting requirements.

Once the Conservation Tender Management System proved to be successful it was subsequently implemented by a neighbouring CMA in tenders for salinity control and threatened bird species habitat.

Anne is now the BushTender Program Manager for the Department of Sustainability & Environment (DSE) where she led the adoption of the Conservation Tender Management System to run statewide tender processes for protecting native vegetation across a range of bioregions. Spatial Vision has recently completed a series of enhancements to the system to enable it cater for a broad range of tender types and their associated assessment processes.

Most recently the application has been enhanced to provide an increased flexibility of the application achieved. Specific biodiversity assets can be scored using a customised version of the Native Vegetation scoring system requiring surveyors to rate specific attributes in addition to the standard native vegetation features. The application provides this flexibility by dividing the Native Vegetation scoring framework into independent scoring modules. When a new auction is created the user is prompted for the set of scoring modules appropriate for that auction. The modules included influence the questions asked during scoring as well as the layout and format of screens.

Further information on BushTenders can be found on the DSE website: www.dse.vic.gov.au/nativevegetation.

For further information, please contact: Anne Buchan on 03 9637 8655

Copyright © Spatial Vision, Wednesday, 20-December-2006