The landscape is highly modified and is dominated by agriculture land use (84%). Today approximately a quarter of all residents, rely directly upon agriculture for their income. The best soils for agricultural productivity exist on privately owned farms with the national parks and reserves generally containing less productive soils. Most of the vegetation that once covered the landscape is now rare or endangered and contained to national parks, reserves, and state forests such as The Grampians and Little Desert National Parks, Black Range State Forest, Mt Arapiles–Tooan State Parks and the Pyrenees Range.
Strips of riparian vegetation, along waterways, connect these parks particularly in and around the Grampians and Pyrenees. The Wimmera also contains 25% of Victoria’s wetlands, which are predominantly in the South-west. In the West Wimmera Shire there is good connectivity of native vegetation due to the combination of wetlands in the swales on the adjacent dunes.
Ecological vegetation is diverse and ranges from mountains and plains to desert; from moist foothill forest to Box–Ironbark Forest, Buloke Woodland, grasslands, wetlands, and Mallee Heath. The average annual rainfall varies from 1,000mm in the Grampians to as low as 300mm across the Northern Plains.
The region includes the local government regions of Hindmarsh, Yarriambiack, Northern Grampians, West Wimmera, Horsham Rural City, as well as part of Ararat, Buloke, and Pyrenees shires. Most of the region’s population lives in the key regional centres of Horsham and Stawell and in smaller towns such as Warracknabeal, Nhill, Dimboola, and Edenhope.