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Introduction: making it count

Sarah Legge, David B. Lindenmayer, Natasha M. Robinson,

Benjamin C. Scheele, Darren M. Southwell, Brendan A. Wintle,

John C.Z. Woinarski and Elisa Bayraktarov

Biodiversity is monitored very poorly in Australia. This is despite an enormous
literature on monitoring (Lindenmayer and Gibbons 2012; Lindenmayer and
Likens 2010); copious institutional rhetoric about its importance to environmental
management, management evaluation and public engagement; and the inclusion of
explicit targets to develop national monitoring programs in key national and
international policy documents (Convention on Biological Diversity 2010; Natural
Resource Management Ministerial Council 2010). Our failure to monitor
biodiversity effectively is recorded and lamented in successive State of the
Environment reports (Cresswell and Murphy 2017; State of the Environment
Committee 2011) and reviews of national biodiversity conservation policy
(Commonwealth of Australia 2016).
Monitoring is an essential element of the conservation management of
threatened species and ecological communities. Monitoring data underpin
assessments of a species’ or ecological community’s conservation status, thus
threading the species or ecological community into policy frameworks for
legislative protection. Monitoring is crucial for understanding drivers of decline,
and for identifying research priorities. It is used to evaluate management