216 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
et al. 2013). Although there is an intuitive appeal to the notion that people who
know more will care more, quantifying the benefits to species arising from
increased awareness remains an outstanding challenge. Quantifying benefits to
species of increased awareness and social engagement in threatened species
conservation will help support decisions about how much to spend on it at the
expense of other monitoring priorities.
Serendipitous discovery
Surveillance monitoring is a widely used approach to monitoring for the purpose
of ‘keeping a finger on the pulse’ of ecosystems and species. It has been described
as ‘unfocused collection of detailed data that are perhaps generally relevant to the
investigation, but not directed at hypothesis discrimination’ (Nichols and Williams
2006). There are several threatened species monitoring programs in which there is
there is no particular question being considered by the monitoring, or no
particular trigger in place to act on an observed change in a population, even
under the auspices of threatened species recovery plans (Lindenmayer et al. 2013a).
Nevertheless, there are examples of surveillance monitoring programs that have
been highly inf luential in triggering and informing urgent conservation actions
(Wintle et al. 2010; Chapter 12). The imperative to quantify expected benefits of
monitoring before spending money on it makes surveillance monitoring difficult
to justify compared with more targeted (question-driven) approaches, when
resources for monitoring are highly contested. It is extremely difficult to estimate
the expected benefits of a serendipitous discovery before it has been made.
abandonment and low chick survival hampers the success of the program. Multiple
plausible hypotheses exist to explain this failure. In collaboration with the USA Fish
and Wildlife Service, Runge et al. (2011) framed the management problem as: ‘What
management strategy should be undertaken at the Necedah NWR to benefit the
whooping cranes ... in the face of uncertainty about what is causing reproductive
failure?’ A set of eight competing hypotheses were evaluated and weighted by
experts, reflecting how certain they were in each. These included harassment of
adults by black flies, nutrient limitations and human disturbance of nesting birds. A
value of information (VOI) analysis was used to identify how management outcomes
could be improved by resolving uncertainty about reproductive failure. The greatest
VOI came from discerning the black fly hypothesis from all the others because the
best management action to improve reproductive success depended most on whether
black flies were the causative agent or not (Fig. 16.2). By resolving this uncertainty
alone, the expected fledging rate increased 25.7%, a level large enough to change the
long-term prognosis for this population. Monitoring focused on a critical uncertainty
can make a tangible contribution to the long-term persistence of this population.