9 – Summary: monitoring extent and adequacy for threatened biodiversity^129● (^) Fish are also poorly monitored, scoring lower than mammals, birds and frogs
on seven metrics (and ranking only third on the remaining two).
● (^) The highest scores overall are for coordination of monitoring effort for birds
and frogs. The large, enthusiastic and cooperative volunteer workforces, often
centrally managed, that are involved in bird monitoring (Chapters 4, 11, 28, 31)
may explain the relatively high score for bird monitoring. In the case of frogs,
many threatened species have small distributions, making monitoring
coordination an easier task (Chapter 12).
● (^) Monitoring metrics that generally score lowest are demographic parameters,
data availability and reporting, and links to management. The poor
performance of the last two is especially concerning, because it indicates that
existing monitoring programs are failing to report, and failing to inform or
affect management.
The monitoring evaluations in Chapters 3–8 also examine several factors that
might inf luence monitoring adequacy (Table 9.1). Some of these results are
encouraging. Species that are listed as threatened under the Environment Protection
and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) have generally more adequate
monitoring than species included only in non-statutory lists (e.g. IUCN). Similarly,
for most vertebrate groups, the most highly threatened taxa tend to have better
Fig. 9.1. The average scores out of 5 for each of nine metrics of for the extent and adequacy of a national
monitoring program, evaluated for all threatened taxa in each of the five vertebrate groups (see Table 9.1;
scores are drawn from Chapters 3–7).