6 – The extent and adequacy of monitoring for Australian threatened reptile species^71restricted to a single island (off the south coast of Tasmania) whose ruggedness
precludes safe access.
Recovery plans for threatened species provide the framework for coordination
of conservation management actions for threatened species. These plans generally
include monitoring as an objective in its own right, as a tool that can provide
evidence to managers warning of a need for emergency response, or as a
mechanism to assess the success of, and to help refine, management actions (Smith
and Robertson 1999). However, in recovery plans for threatened reptiles,
monitoring is typically not rated as a high priority. Furthermore, as at December
2016, only nine of the 60 reptile species listed as threatened under the EPBC Act
have current recovery plans, another 12 have lapsed recovery plans that are
(nominally) in the process of being updated, and 39 have never had recovery plans
(albeit for six of these, recovery plans are proposed). Without the conservation
framework established under recovery plans, there is little impetus to develop and
maintain monitoring programs, or to integrate disparate components of any
monitoring activity, or to make public results from any such monitoring.
Additionally – partly because there are so few recovery plans and partly because
most reptile species lack the public and political appeal that helps catalyse recovery
support for many other Australian threatened species – there is relatively little
resourcing for conservation of most of Australia’s threatened reptile species. This
limited resourcing further marginalises monitoring activity, because it is often
perceived by managers to be a less critical action for recovery than threat
mitigation, captive breeding or other components of the recovery package.
Partly because direct on-ground monitoring is generally little resourced, and
because it may require a long-term commitment, some monitoring of Australian
threatened reptile species is indirect. For example, population trends have been
inferred for some threatened reptile species from variation in the number of
collection records over time, or from more readily available information on the
extent and rate of habitat destruction and fragmentation (Dorrough and Ash 1999;
Richardson 2008), degradation of habitat quality (Howland et al. 2016), loss of key
resources (Shine et al. 1998) or spatial contraction leading to apparent loss of
genetic lineages (Dubey and Shine 2010; Maldonado et al. 2012). However, some of
these indirect monitoring approaches (such as trends over time in the numbers of
museum specimens collected) may have many biases and hence be poor substitutes
for direct sampling of abundance. In some cases, innovative sampling techniques
have led to significant improvements in the cost-efficiency and the capability to
collect substantial monitoring data; examples include the sampling of pipeline
trenches (Swan and Wilson 2012), and use of remote cameras (Treilibs et al. 2016),
fibroscopes (Bull and Hutchinson 2018) and ink-cards (Smith et al. 2012).
Some threatened reptile species are monitored incidentally within broader
monitoring programs that assess general biodiversity trends in particular areas,