Most conservation research aims to inform management of environmental challenges, but scientific evidence is used inconsistently in environmental programmes and practice. We used semi-structured retrospective interviews to ask 12 environmental scientists and 14 practitioners (land managers, park rangers, project managers and planners from natural resource management agencies) about factors that facilitated and hindered the use of scientific input during 15 environmental projects. We used the common factors from interviews to develop a process model describing how scientific input informs programmes and practice. The model emphasised the social dimensions of environmental projects which are often overlooked when these projects are planned, managed and evaluated. It highlighted the pivotal role of relationships in achieving outcomes which include creating practical, useful products and tools, and robust, credible and trusted evidence. By clarifying the process of how scientific knowledge informs environmental programmes and practice, the model enabled us to provide guidance about how to undertake transdisciplinary work and suggest indicators to track progress. Although derived from environmental projects, the guidance is likely to apply to other fields, particularly where different disciplines work together.

There are numerous examples illustrating the integration of Aboriginal knowledge and participation in rangelands management. At the 2019 Australian Rangelands Conference we aimed to explore how Aboriginal culture and its core values have something deeper to contribute to rangelands management. We explore this through a Yungadhu (Malleefowl) cultural depiction and story. The depiction and story explain the often cited, but not well understood, concepts of Kinship, Country, Lore, and Dreaming. The story provides insight into Aboriginal people's world view and is used in this paper to illustrate how well it aligns with current thinking about resilience in rangelands landscapes and communities. Significantly, we explain how the deep wisdom that resides in Aboriginal cultures has something meaningful to contribute to achieving the conditions for resilience.

The essential biodiversity variables (EBV) framework was developed primarily to improve the detection of significant changes in global biodiversity. Its application at national level must support county-specific policy and management needs as well as allowing comparisons of estimates of biodiversity change between countries and their aggregation for reporting at regional, continental and global scales.

Here we outline a process for prioritising biodiversity variables at national scale using the EBV framework. The process involves separately identifying candidate EBVs that are useful for tracking important changes in biodiversity in each major ecological feature in each ecoregion within a country. The list is then prioritised based on the proportion of ecological feature ecoregion combinations using each variable within and across terrestrial, marine and freshwater realms.

We showcased this process in Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) using terrestrial, marine and freshwater ecoregions of the world as bioregional strata; vegetation formations as terrestrial ecological features, and broad aquatic ecosystem types as marine and freshwater ecological features. There was sufficient knowledge of ecological processes to identify useful variables for 85% of the ecological feature ecoregion combinations in NSW. Eleven candidate EBVs covering all six EBV classes, were useful in all three environmental realms.

Our structured, stepwise approach to variable selection provides a transparent process for identifying important elements of ecological theory underpinning biodiversity monitoring within countries. Worldwide adoption of a process for prioritising biodiversity variables such as the one we propose here would help ensure consistency of national contributions to global biodiversity assessments.