18 – Designing a monitoring framework for Australian Wildlife Conservancy^24186% of Australian bird species, 72% of native mammal species and 54% of native
reptiles and frogs, including over 90 vertebrate species listed as nationally
threatened. AWC protects a substantial proportion of remaining populations of
many threatened mammal species including over 10% of greater bilbies Macrotis
lagotis, over 30% of numbats Myrmecobius fasciatus and 90% of bridled nailtail
wallabies Onychogalea fraenata.
AWC aims to deliver effective, evidence-based wildlife conservation. Two
major strategies are: (1) landscape management of fire, feral animals and weeds
(delivered across all sanctuaries); and (2) reintroductions of threatened mammals
to feral predator–free areas. AWC is the only organisation with a national program
of reintroductions in Australia, having reintroduced 11 species of threatened
mammals to five feral predator-free sanctuaries – one island and four fenced
‘mainland islands’ (Anson 2016). Additional reintroductions are planned to four
new ‘mainland islands’ in the next few years.
AWC actively monitors populations of 38 threatened species. For some
threatened species, such as Sharman’s rock-wallaby Petrogale sharmani,
Carpentarian pseudantechinus Pseudantechinus mimulus, purple-crowned fairy-
wren Malurus coronatus and several threatened frog species, AWC is the only
organisation delivering systematic monitoring; that is, without AWC’s monitoring
effort, changes in the status of these species would be unknown.
AWC’s monitoring framework
To meet the mission, AWC’s conservation managers routinely require information
on the following questions:
● (^) Are populations of species stable, increasing or in decline?
● (^) Are threats to species increasing or decreasing?
● (^) What are the outcomes of management interventions?
● (^) How should management effort be allocated across multiple threat
management strategies?
AWC implements an integrated program of monitoring and research to
accommodate these information requirements (Fig. 18.1). Central to the program is
the monitoring of the status and trend of conservation assets, such as threatened
species, and threats to those assets on each of AWC’s sanctuaries. Status
monitoring cannot provide strong inference on the drivers of change in
ecosystems. Nevertheless, a status monitoring program can provide correlative
evidence of drivers of change (e.g. a decline in a threatened species may be
associated with an increase in feral animals). Where relevant components of an
ecosystem are well understood, this evidence may be sufficient to inf luence the
allocation of management effort on a sanctuary; in the example used here, it may
justify an increase in the effort directed to controlling feral animals.