104 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
● (^) the ability of the Minister to attach conditions to approvals of proposed actions
(Part 5, Division 2, Clause 134(3f))
● (^) responsibilities to determine conservation status, understand processes that
affect the status or sustainable use of biodiversity, assess strategies for
conservation and sustainable use, and determine conservation needs and
priorities (Part 12, Division 2)
● (^) the need to measure progress against conservation and threat abatement
criteria specified in recovery plans (Part 13, Division 5, Clause 270(2b))
● (^) the ability to include monitoring in terms of Conservation Agreements
between the Minister and landholders (Part 14, Clause 306)
● (^) obligations to monitor the status of, and inform the management of heritage
places and protected areas (Part 15 Divisions 1A, 3A, 4)
● (^) requirements to monitor compliance with decisions and regulations (Part 17,
Div ision 3).
Strategic research
Monitoring may be motivated by theoretical or applied research questions. For
example, long time-series of observations on the composition of ecological
communities enable some aspects of species co-existence and community assembly
theories to be tested more powerfully than is possible with short-duration
snapshots (e.g. Letten et al. 2014). Time-series data accumulated by targeted
monitoring also elucidate mechanisms of ecosystem response to environmental
change – knowledge that is crucial in building capacity to predict future changes in
biodiversity (Lindenmayer et al. 2014a).
Long-term monitoring programs can be important focal points for large
collaborations that link networks of studies aimed at producing insights into global
research questions, especially when they are linked to manipulative experiments.
For example, the Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments
(GLORIA; Grabherr et al. 1994) and International Tundra Experiment (ITEX,
Walker et al. 2006) link a series of studies on the world’s cold-climate ecosystems
threatened by climate change. All use standardised methods to monitor
community-level ecological responses to ambient environmental change
(GLORIA) and experimental warming (ITEX). Both produce valuable insights and
generalisations on the resilience of alpine ecosystems, including TECs in Australia
(Hoffmann et al. 2010; Venn et al. 2012; Williams et al. 2014).
Monitoring design
Ecological monitoring involves experimentation to test hypotheses about change
and its causes. Experimental design is therefore a crucial aspect of adaptive
monitoring that determines the reliability of inferences that can be drawn from the