8 – Monitoring threatened ecosystems and ecological communities^103Statutory and other reporting obligations
Statutory instruments including State of Environment (SoE) reports and
legislative schedules of threatened species and ecological communities enable
Australia to report on the status of biodiversity. For example, the number of
ecological communities listed in different categories of threat (Critically
Endangered, Endangered and Vulnerable) under the Environment Protection and
Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) are routinely tracked in
successive SoE reports (e.g. SoE 2011 Committee 2011) and also form a basis for
reporting on Aichi targets under the Convention on Biological Diversity. To be
listed under the EPBC Act, an ecological community must meet one or more
criteria that specify threshold rates of decline in distribution, functionally
important species, ecological integrity or other detrimental change. Ongoing
surveillance of these ecological features of TECs is therefore essential to provide
an evidence base to review and update listings of TECs to ensure that their
current status is ref lected on the schedules. Similar statutory provisions exist in
some states and territories, while public land management agencies and some
non-government land managers also need to report on the status of TECs in
their protected areas or covenanted lands. The need for surveillance monitoring
of TECs therefore extends across multiple sectors and throughout Australian
landscapes and seascapes.
Information needs for ecosystem management
Monitoring is one of the pillars of adaptive management: a structured ‘learning by
doing’ approach that involves progressive development of strategies to achieve
specified management goals through modelling, experimentation and monitoring
(Keith et al. 2011). The type of monitoring required to serve these purposes is
different to that required for surveillance (see ‘Monitoring design’ later).
Lindenmayer and Likens (2010) argue that monitoring for management needs to be
explicitly question-driven and underpinned by a conceptual model and rigorous
experimental design. Many management decisions and choices are predicated on
knowing the current state of the system – operational information that well-
targeted monitoring of ecological communities can provide (e.g. Duncan and
Wintle 2008; Addison et al. 2015; Cook et al. 2016).
For ecological communities, the need to evaluate performance of conservation
actions and inform adjustment of conservation strategies to improve their
outcomes arises in many different contexts. Examples include the need to: inform
management of protected areas; manage resource use sustainably (e.g. in
production forests and fisheries); ensure that development impacts comply with
approval conditions; and evaluate outcomes of recovery actions, restoration
strategies and offsets. National legislation (EPBC Act) includes several provisions
that may require biodiversity monitoring of TECs. These include: