The freshwater and marine ecosystems of the Great Barrier Reef are being impacted by sediment and nutrients exported from agricultural areas. In recent times, Australian Governments have made significant investments into developing improved land management strategies intended to ameliorate water quality exported from coastal catchments. The Burdekin River exports the largest load of suspended sediments into the Great Barrier Reef lagoon, largely related to widespread grazing in the upper catchment. This paper will describe the measurement techniques used in a decade long study to characterise the processes of erosion and runoff from the plot scale to catchment scale for a grazed rangeland in the upper Burdekin. The benefits of land management strategies that lead to improved pastoral productivity and reduced suspended sediment export at some scales were not visible using end of catchment monitoring alone. We demonstrate how a nested monitoring approach was used to identify the key processes contributing to suspended sediment delivery and demonstrate the success of targeted land management strategies.