106 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
- and long-term manipulative experiments in mallee woodlands of south-
western NSW to evaluate fire and grazing effects in the context of a variable
climate (Keith and Tozer 2012).
How much monitoring activity occurs and who carries it out?
Recovery planning and protected area management
Biodiversity monitoring is widely promoted and planned for management of TECs.
A sample of 10 of the 25 recovery plans adopted under EPBC Act for TECs around
the continent all included monitoring of some aspect of biodiversity as a priority
action, and some also included monitoring of threats (Table 8.1). Similarly, some
management plans prepared by government and non-government managers of
protected areas provide for monitoring of TECs within reserve boundaries. In most
cases, however, monitoring actions were vague, generic and did not explicitly
recognise the TECs as significant assets of a reserve (Table 8.2). Few of the plans
provided guidance on how monitoring was to be done, though some recovery plans
identified actions to develop methods (e.g. Turner 2012a, 2012b). Only two plans
included explicit actions to manage the data and adjust management where
monitoring outcomes indicated a need (Latch 2008; Department of the
Environment 2015). Estimated costs per annum varied by two orders of magnitude
(Table 8.1), ref lecting contrasting travel costs and presumably different levels of
monitoring detail envisaged but not specified. Few of the plans that reviewed drew
a clear distinction between diagnostic and surveillance monitoring to meet
strategic and operational needs of ecosystem management, respectively, yet this has
significant implications for design and implementation of monitoring programs for
ecological communities.
A detailed audit of whether and how identified biodiversity monitoring actions
are implemented is beyond the scope of this chapter. Anecdotal information would
suggest that much of the planned monitoring is never carried out, or at least not
compiled, reported and fed back to inform adjustments to management.
Monitoring protocols that are rigorously designed, regularly and consistently
implemented and linked to management decision making appear to be rare (see
Box 8.1 for an example), consistent with findings of Addison et al. (2015) for
marine protected areas.
Systematic monitoring programs
A rapid review of monitoring programs discoverable through publications and
reports suggests that biodiversity is monitored in ~24 (30%) of the 80 TECs
currently listed under the EPBC Act (Table 8.3). Eight of these are monitored only
for changes in land cover. The most systematic of these programs is the
Queensland Statewide Landcover and Trees Study (DSITI 2015): a generic remote
sensing program that monitors annual change in cover of woody vegetation