174 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
the expertise needed to implement the recovery programs, including relevant
land managers and or stakeholders.● (^) Strong scientific, technical and stakeholder synergies exist among the three
recovery programs.
● (^) Each monitoring program has consistently had state agency support, always in
kind and often financial. State agency employees have often undertaken the
monitoring.
● (^) Research has played a key role in each recovery program to fill key knowledge
gaps and to provide evidenced-based policy and management.
The small number of other threatened amphibian species in Australia with
successful long-term monitoring programs (Chapter 5) also share many of these
elements. However, these elements are absent or poorly developed for all other
threatened Australian amphibian species.
Effective monitoring may have occurred for these species with or without
sound recovery planning. Monitoring alone does not save species, but is
nevertheless a key element of a successful, integrated adaptive management
process. The contrast in conservation outcomes between species with and without
well-integrated long-term monitoring and recovery programs demonstrates the
merits and value of investment in threatened species monitoring.
In the broader context of natural resource management costs, this monitoring
is not expensive (Table 12.1). For those of us that have implemented long-term
threatened species recovery programs and seen the on-ground tangible benefits of
long-term monitoring, the investment just makes very good policy sense. It is not
possible to successfully recover threatened species, let alone demonstrate success,
without an adequate monitoring program. If monitoring programs had not been
established and maintained, the southern corroboree frog, and most likely the Baw
Baw Frog, would now be extinct, and the spotted tree frog would be extinct in New
South Wales and Victorian populations more severely depleted than at present.
However, we probably would not know this and there would be high uncertainty
around the actual conservation status of these species. Furthermore, our
knowledge and understanding of threatening processes operating on these species,
how to manage them and where to apply management interventions, would be
extremely limited.
Lessons learned
The four most critical elements to supporting the development and sustaining
long-term monitoring programs are:
● (^) A sound understanding is required by all recovery team members, natural
resource management stakeholders and senior resourcing decision makers of