120 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
monitoring is sufficiently designed and resourced to produce informative insights
into the restoration and management of TECs (see Box 8.2).
Lessons learned
● (^) The current level of TEC monitoring in Australia is inadequate to inform their
management and track their status: less than one-third of listed TECs are
systematically monitored, and most of those programs have key limitations,
such as poor coverage across the TEC range, poor design (constraining the
potential for detecting trends or diagnosing causes of change), no links to
management, and poor data coordination, availability and reporting.
● (^) Monitoring undertaken by citizens and industry suffers similar limitations,
and remains largely untapped beyond its immediate context.
● (^) Planning documents are also inadequate, either through a lack of connection
between related plans and projects, or through failure to implement adopted
strategies for integrated management and monitoring.
● (^) To improve the contribution of monitoring to the conservation of TECs, we
recommend:
➤ (^) implementing biodiversity monitoring in spatially representative samples
of all TECs across the range of land tenures they occupy
➤ (^) more explicit strategies and standards in planning documents for
surveillance and diagnostic monitoring of TECs, cross-linked to relevant
projects
➤ (^) strengthening commitments through institutional frameworks to ensure
rigorous comparative designs and continuity of TEC monitoring
➤ (^) strengthening evidence-based links from monitoring outcomes to
management and regulatory decisions for TECs
➤ (^) developing scientific standards for surveillance and diagnostic monitoring
of TECs for deployment in development approvals and public funding
programs, with emphasis on simple rigorous monitoring designs
➤ (^) establishing a central publicly accessible repository for monitoring data on
threatened species and ecological communities (see LTERN portal)
➤ (^) stipulating the supply of monitoring data and metadata to the publicly
accessible data repository as a routine condition of all development
approvals, biodiversity licensing and grants from publicly funded
programs.
Acknowledgements
We thank Val English, Louise Gilfedder and Matt White for advice on monitoring
activity and Rod Fensham and Sarah Legge for comments on the draft manuscript.