Meet Dr Beth Penrose: Exploring Australia's vast, overlooked rangelands

By  Smriti Daniel 13 November 2026 6 min read

Out on the rangelands, Dr Beth Penrose is used to feeling very far away from a lab - the wide sky curving above, native grasslands stretching to the horizon and no fences to break up the view into the tidy green squares you’d expect further south.

“In the NT, they're generally between 10,000 and a million hectares,” Dr Beth Penrose estimated. “Some of them are bigger than a million.”

The dirt trails are rough, she explained. To make it across one property might take four hours or more by vehicle - if a road can be found. In the wet season, the only sane option is often a helicopter.

It’s land on a scale that defies easy comprehension from Dr Penrose’s desk, but one of the things she loves most about her days in the field.

It’s also why Dr Penrose is only one of a handful of rangeland scientists currently working in Australia. Holding a joint appointment with CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, and the NT’s Charles Darwin University, she splits her time between the two – and between the metaphorical and literal fields she works in, holding a holistic view of the system she studies.

An unlikely path into pasture and paddocks

Dr Penrose’s path into rangeland science has not been a straight line. Instead, it comes by the way of a stint at art school in the UK, followed by a role as a communicator at an interactive science centre. She would go on to spend time in Madagascar, before enrolling in an environmental science degree while working at a physics laboratory in the UK where she helped communicate science from the UK’s ISIS Neutron and Muon Source.

For her PhD she studied how radionuclides (atoms with unstable nuclei) from a nuclear accident transfer to cows’ milk through grass.

“My PhD wasn't in rangelands but in pasture, which is also very uncommon,” Dr Penrose said. “There's not many pasture scientists left, although there are far more than there are rangeland specialists.”

It led her to a postdoc, and to Australia to take up a job as one of only a handful of lecturers, specialising in pasture research at the University of Tasmania.

The 6 and a half years she spent there deepened her understanding of the links between soil, plant nutrition and human and animal health. In 2023, she and her husband and (then) toddler sailed their boat from Queensland to Darwin, where she now lives.

Holding two things at once

Her chosen field is a fascinating one, one in which there remains much to learn. Rangelands are not monotone like the pastures or paddocks most of us are used to seeing – instead they are populated by a great variety of native grasses.

“They cover 75 per cent of Australia's land mass,” Dr Penrose said. “They're a haven for amazing plants and amazing animals, and they're worth protecting and cherishing, and enabling us to use, but also to retain their intactness for future generations.”

They are seldom ploughed, rarely fertilised or sown with any species at all. It’s why they are considered low-input systems, with cattle grazing on land that is very close to its natural state.

Balancing these two seemingly contradictory demands – cattle production in a largely untouched ecosystem – is Dr Penrose’s main concern.

“A lot of my work is really to do with sustainability and being able to balance productivity and productive landscapes with economic success and environmental co-benefits,” Dr Penrose said.

It’s not an easy balancing act by any means.

“A lot of very production-focused agricultural scientists find it very difficult to appreciate the environmental component and the landscape component of these systems,” she said. “And environmental people find it very difficult to reconcile both the production and economic requirements.”

Having studied Australia’s vast rangelands, Dr Penrose understands where the pressure points are. For instance, a watering point, whether it’s natural or artificial, draws cattle toward it, creating what is known as a piosphere – an area that’s influenced by grazing. She says this effect radiates out in a rough circle – sometimes reaching up to 10 kilometres from a water source, including rivers and billabongs, where vegetation is also most likely to stay green and appealing to stock all year long.

“Those areas can be quite heavily eroded and also overgrazed,” Dr Penrose said. “That can cause problems for water quality, and also for the biodiversity that relies on those riparian corridors to exist – species like the Purple-crowned Fairy-wren.”

Rocky outcrops, or stone country have their own value, not necessarily for grazing but as critical habitat for reptiles – and these too can be impacted by wandering cattle.

Protecting these unique habitats while maintaining beef production is a focus of her research.

Working with producers, not on them

Dr Penrose recognised early on who the people most invested in her work were – and it was most often the beef producers themselves.

“Producers are amazing, and they want to help,” Dr Penrose said.

“They want to do things better. I focus on working with producers to help them achieve their goals and then introduce a few ideas if I have any suggestions that are supplementary to that.”

She begins by listening to what producers are already concerned about: how to manage grazing across the paddock, regenerating areas where growth has slowed or dropped off, keeping stock off watercourses, and particularly on the larger properties, finding ways to nurture biodiversity.

“It’s never about dictating to them – it’s about working together to have impact.”

Quite organically, virtual fencing has become one of the most useful tools in her kit, as it offers a way to manage cattle grazing on these large properties.

The emission question

Though this region of Australia has been producing world class beef for decades, there’s still a lot of questions for scientists to tackle. Among them is how much methane is actually produced by rangeland cattle. 

“We actually don't really know what level of methane emissions are coming from cattle in the rangelands,” Dr Penrose said. “We have a model that estimates it, but there are very few empirical measurements.”

Beyond emissions, Dr Penrose points to a bigger challenge on the horizon: the growing number of industries with an interest in rangeland country. These include renewable energy companies and mining concerns, alongside the need to properly include Traditional Owners in decisions about how land is used.

“There's a lot of competing entities who want to use the rangelands,” Dr Penrose emphasised. “How do we enable people to collaborate, to be able to use the rangelands in multiple ways that benefit the environment, benefit the people and benefit the regions?”