102 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
well as the physical environment that they inhabit. Communities and ecosystems
are useful concepts for managing biodiversity because they shine a light on
ecological processes that operate above the species level, including food webs,
facilitation processes, competitive interactions, mutualisms, biomass production,
habitat structure, resource cycling, successional dynamics and more (Keith et al.
2015). Moreover, different communities and ecosystems support different
assemblages of species, so they are often viewed as useful surrogates for a large
suite of poorly known biota that are unlikely to be targeted individually for
conservation assessment or action (Hunter et al. 2016). For these reasons,
communities and ecosystems have important roles, complementing species-by-
species approaches in biodiversity conservation planning and management
through protected area design, environmental impact assessment, ecological
restoration, ecosystem management and sustaining ecosystem services.
Australia is one of several countries in which biodiversity conservation
legislation enables the listing, protection and management of threatened ecological
communities (Keith 2009; Nicholson et al. 2015). Since the mid-1990s, statutory
lists of threatened ecological communities, alongside lists of threatened species,
have become central to decision making on development approvals (e.g. Keith
2009), conservation investments (Auerbach et al. 2015) and land use planning in
Australia (Whitehead et al. 2017). Other jurisdictions in Europe, Canada and
Africa have similar legislative provisions, and in 2014 the IUCN adopted Red List
criteria to identify ecosystems that are most at risk of collapse (Keith et al. 2015).
Australian federal, state and territory governments recently agreed in principle to
align their listing processes for ecological communities to a ‘Common Assessment
Methodology’ based on this international standard (MEM 2015).
Understanding how and why ecological communities and ecosystems change
through time is essential to assess their status for listing, diagnose the causes and
mechanisms of change, and evaluate the outcomes of policy and management
actions. With these needs in mind, this chapter reviews current monitoring activity
for ecological communities across Australia.
What motivates monitoring?
Most monitoring of ecological communities ref lects multiple motivations. This
section discusses how the main motivations inf luence the type of monitoring
carried out. In addition, curiosity about how and why environmental changes
occur cannot be underestimated as a motivator for ecologists, natural area
managers, landholders and citizen scientists to follow the fate of ecological
communities through time. An interest in natural history can be the common
thread that engages citizens and professionals to share goals and support
monitoring outcomes (Bonney et al. 2009).