80 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
threats are poorly resolved, the effectiveness of management responses is not
evaluated, there is inadequate evidence to improve management, information is
insufficient to appropriately revise conservation status, and managers may lose
opportunities to prevent extinctions because precipitous declines are not detected
with sufficient time to respond (Woinarski et al. 2017). The collation reported here
indicates that monitoring is likely to be particularly poor for species for which there
is no recovery plan, yet the overall proportion of threatened species with national
recovery plans is declining (Walsh et al. 2012). Unfortunately, this suggests that
enhancement of monitoring programs for threatened reptile species may be difficult
to achieve. The conservation outlook for Australia’s threatened reptile species will
be considerably improved if there is more commitment to (including explicit
funding for) robust and long-lasting monitoring programs, more public availability
of monitoring data, more coordination of monitoring activity and more integration
of monitoring actions within conservation management programs.
Lessons learned
● (^) There are few long-term and adequate monitoring programs for Australian
threatened reptile species, but these few cases (such as for the western swamp
tortoise) show that such monitoring is a pivotal component of successful
recovery effort.
Table 6.2. Variation among groupings of Australian threatened reptiles in the adequacy of monitoring
programs.
Values represent the sum of scores across the nine metrics of the monitoring evaluation framework given in Chapter 2, with scores potentially varying
from 0 (no monitoring) to 45 (optimal monitoring across all metrics). Variation among categories within a group was tested with Kruskal–Wallis one-way
analysis of variance.
Grouping
Statistical
significance Category (number of species)
Sum monitoring score:
mean (s.e.)
Taxonomic/ecological
group
H = 18.5,
P =0.0003
Marine turtles (6) 32.3 (4.7)
Freshwater turtles (7) 10.7 (4.1)
Terrestrial squamates (53) 13.4 (1.8)
Sea snakes (3) 25.3 (0.7)
EPBC Act
conservation status
H = 13.5,
P = 0.004
Unlisted (9) 7.1 (3.9)
Vulnerable (33) 12.2 (2.5)
Endangered (18) 20.0 (2.8)
Critically endangered (9) 28.4 (4.9)
Recovery Plan status H = 25.8,
P <0.0001
No plan (40) 8 .1 (1. 8 )
No current plan, but plan
under development (8)
26.0 (3.6)
Lapsed plan, with revised
plan under development (12)
27.0 (3.9)
Current plan (9) 25.2 (4.6)