172 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
● (^) management intervention trials within frameworks that permit rigorous
evaluation, with sampling designs informed by the monitoring program
● (^) programs for engaging natural resource managers and other stakeholders,
including the media, for awareness raising and community engagement
● (^) clear justification and direction for recovery planning and further resource
allocation.
Conversely, almost none of the above outcomes have eventuated for those
species without long-term monitoring. Trends in distributions and population sizes
of the large brown tree frog, the giant burrowing frog and the stuttering frog are
poorly known; a recent workshop of experts to review and update the conservation
status of Australian frogs identified high levels of uncertainty in most criteria
pertinent to assessing the conservation status of these species (unpublished data),
thus their conservation statuses may have been under-estimated. Although there
was general agreement that these species have declined, the pattern and extent are
unclear, and the locations of persisting populations are unknown.
Knowledge of the large brown tree frog, the giant burrowing frog and the
stuttering frog are inadequate for distribution or population modelling and
management risk assessment. With the exception of the giant burrowing frog, for
which some research has been undertaken on forest management impacts (e.g.
Penman et al. 2005), knowledge of potential threats to these species are mostly
inferred from other ecologically similar species. In most instances, development
and implementation of targeted conservation actions for these species would be
difficult, because knowledge of how threats are operating and where target
populations persist is inadequate. Consequently, most conservation/recovery plans
for these species (e.g. National and State Recovery Plans, Action Statements and
Conservation Advice statements) lack well-refined, targeted and measurable
recovery actions, and virtually no direct recovery actions have been undertaken on
any of these species. In some cases, this has led to the development of poor
conservation advice for species, such as the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988
Action Statement for the large brown tree frog (Gillespie et al. 2016).
These circumstances have also led to some more perverse outcomes, including
politically reactionary management responses, such as expensive and ineffective
pre-logging surveys (Gillespie et al. 2016), at least two legal battles, and potentially
the extinction of the southern form of the stuttering frog, which may constitute a
separate species, although more genetic investigation is needed to confirm this (S.
Donnellan, South Australian Museum, pers. comm.). Uncertainties about the
taxonomic and current population/geographic status of the southern form of the
stuttering frog are a direct result of inadequate baseline surveys and a lack of
long-term monitoring. Monitoring programs for the southern corroboree frog and
spotted tree frog led to early warnings of imminent extinctions, enabling quick and