226 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
projects, to maximise standardisation and rigour. The framework prescribes
specific monitoring of population and threat outcomes at the point of investment,
coupled with target-based evaluation, enabling the program to facilitate adaptive
learning and demonstrate return on investment to the community and taxpayers.
SoS provides a framework for delivering a large-scale threatened species program
with underlying principles of cost-effectiveness and objective decision making.
Introduction
Saving our Species (SoS) is the New South Wales (NSW) Government’s f lagship
program to manage threatened species, formally launched in 2013. It has an
overarching objective ‘to maximise the number of threatened species that are secure
in the wild in NSW for 100 years’ and is guided by principles of cost-effectiveness,
transparency, objectivity and scientific rigour (OEH 2013a, 2013b). The program’s
scope includes more than 1000 species, ecological communities and key threatening
processes listed on the Schedules of the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016 and it
employs quantitative methods to prioritise investment between these entities, such
as the Project Prioritisation Protocol (Joseph et al. 2009).
SoS has been designed as a framework to guide investment in threatened
species by all stakeholders (government and non-government) across NSW, so that
the efforts of these stakeholders are complementary and targeted towards clear,
measurable goals. Specifically, this guidance takes the form of conservation
projects: detailed management prescriptions, including mapped priority sites,
which have been developed for over 400 site-managed species so far, and which all
include actions to monitor the response of threats and populations to management.
In 2015, the NSW Government committed an additional A$100 million to the
implementation of SoS over 5 years, increasing focus on the program and,
consequently, the importance of demonstrating return on investment.
A monitoring, evaluation and reporting framework has been developed for SoS
to guide program stakeholders, to ensure consistency and rigour across the
program, and to facilitate data collection that is most useful for informing decision
making and communicating outcomes to government and the community (OEH
2016). A web-enabled database has also been designed and developed specifically to
support SoS, which captures data on management prescriptions, outcome
monitoring data, expenditure and prioritisation parameters, and is accessible by all
program partners.
The monitoring and evaluation challenge
Recent reviews of recovery planning and threatened species management in NSW
have consistently found that data on outcomes are generally insufficient to
meaningfully evaluate success (e.g. ANAO 2007; Ecological Australia 2008; OEH