John Woinarski said when it was considered as a whole the Australian outback covered almost 6 million square kilometres, making it comparable in size to the Amazon Basin and the Sahara Desert.

But the outback was often thought of as distinct regions such as the Kimberleys, Kakadu, the deserts of central Australia, the Lake Eyre Basin and Cape York Peninsula, said Professor Woinarski from Charles Stuart University.

"These iconic areas will fail unless the whole is protected and well-managed," he said.

Professor Woinarski is the lead author of a comprehensive study on the Australian outback, the first study in a series of reports, known as The Outback Papers, co-ordinated by Pew Charitable Trusts.

The study, which will be released in Canberra on Wednesday, found that the Australian outback had global significance and was one of the few large remaining areas of wildness in the world.

"Taken as a whole, the outback is one of the wildest and most intact places on Earth," Professor Woinarski said.

While the area comprised many ecosystems, with different plants and animals, they shared many similarities such as their remoteness, low population density and management challenges.

Traditional national parks systems have been based on protecting threatened species and tourists areas which failed to accept that ecological processes worked over much larger landscape, Professor Woinarski said.

The advantage of considering the outback as a continuous landscape was that broad-scale management solutions could be used with greater efficacy, he said.

Professor Woinarski said feral cats were a major threat to native species in the outback. Other invasive animals such as wild camel, buffalo, cattle and horses were also damaging the landscape, as were weeds and changes to fires regimes over the past 100 years.

"These threats have been gradational and they're getting worse and worse," he said.

"There will come a time when too much has been lost for us to maintain the integrity of the place."

Despite covering more than 70 per cent of the continent, only 5 per cent of the Australian population called the outback home, which meant it was not considered a national or economic priority.

While the people living in the outback were essential for its ongoing management, particularly of fire, many felt disenfranchised. Professor Woinarski said this issue would need to be addressed as part of an overall conservation plan.