206 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
to be modified in some way (namely adaptive monitoring; sensu Lindenmayer and
Likens 2009) to try and better elucidate the factors underpinning declines.
Monitoring small and often rapidly declining populations demands focused,
fit-for-purpose, monitoring programs that target individual threatened species.
However, work on declining mammals in Western Australia (Chapter 13), as well
as that on threatened frogs (Chapter 12) and arboreal marsupials in Victorian
forests (Chapter 14), highlight the value of monitoring multiple species, including
more common species. Multi-species data are valuable to enable quantification of
potential species interactions (including interactions with the target species of
conservation concern) and can help reveal key information on threatening
processes that is not readily discoverable from (usually more limited) data on less
abundant threatened taxa. Indeed, common species can also become threatened, so
collecting baseline data on a range of species can help identify potential future
declines (Chapter 13). The inherent tension here is the need for a monitoring
program to complete targeted surveys of often cryptic or location-restricted
threatened species versus more generic methods and protocols that might be
required to gather data on more common (non-threatened) species, not to mention
the associated cost in collecting more data (see Chapter 20 for an example of this
tension). This underscores the appeal of employing multiple, complementary
methods for monitoring species that still capture statistically sound data on both
the threatened and non-threatened taxa in a given assemblage of interest.
Threatened biodiversity can gain a high public profile with effective
community engagement (see the section on Community Participation, Chapters
26–28, and Chapter 31, for more examples). Popular support can drive political
interest and lead to more assertive recovery efforts. This has been evident in the
major levels of community engagement in the monitoring program for shorebirds
(Chapter 11). Community engagement and support has also been a fundamental
part of the success of the monitoring program for Leadbeater’s possum and
contributed to the maintenance of the work over the past 34 years (Chapter 14).
Public interest can encourage political interest, especially if community support is
sufficiently sophisticated to engage in the political process and argue for
heightened species recovery efforts or changes in the use (or mis-use) of natural
resources that endangers threatened biodiversity. Such efforts have particular
gravitas where robust long-term monitoring data illustrate the rate of decline of a
species or ecological community and the need for alternative forms of management
or particular interventions to avoid extinction (Chapters 10, 13, 14). Of course, an
appropriate response is not always guaranteed and the extinction of the stuttered
frog in Victoria appears to have occurred despite warnings from researchers that
action was required to prevent extinction (Chapter 12).
In many cases where monitoring programs for threatened biodiversity are well
designed and executed, they provide not only information about the target species