2 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
effectiveness (and thus justify investment, or non-investment, in that
management), and to provide evidence to support policy. Finally, monitoring can
be a powerful tool for engaging different sectors of the community.
Despite the multiple potential benefits of monitoring, few of these benefits are
realised. There certainly are examples of very good monitoring programs for some
species and populations (e.g. Chapters 11, 12, 22). However, in general, the status
and trends for most threatened species and ecological communities are unclear, the
relationships between population and/or distributional trends and threatening
processes are often conjectural, and the effectiveness of management to recover
threatened biodiversity is rarely measured and understood. The outcomes of the
accumulated investment in the conservation of threatened biodiversity can rarely
be reported to decision makers at any level, nor to the public. To a large extent, this
obfuscating fog is contributing to the growing lists of species and ecological
communities that are threatened with extinction (Cresswell and Murphy 2017).
The hapless state of monitoring for threatened biodiversity is welded to our failure
to tackle biodiversity conservation, and biodiversity monitoring, more broadly.
What constrains the implementation of meaningful monitoring for threatened
biodiversity? A tangle of methodological (sampling and analytical) challenges,
cross-institutional blockages, within-institutional impediments, policy/legislative
deficiencies, and funding shortfalls contribute to this impasse. In this introductory
chapter, we provide a brief overview of the characteristics of monitoring for
threatened biodiversity that set it apart from general monitoring, and describe the
specific policy and legal context in Australia within which monitoring occurs. We
outline the national leadership required to resolve the current impasse. Finally, we
explain the aim of the book, its ontogeny, and describe how the book is structured.
Key features of effective monitoring of threatened biodiversity
Monitoring design should be bespoke
Two key characteristics distinguish monitoring for threatened biodiversity from
general biodiversity monitoring, which, in many cases, make the former more
difficult. First, monitoring of threatened biodiversity is often more technically and
logistically challenging. Species rarity and/or rapid declines create a range of
sampling design problems, which in turn may have repercussions for resourcing
monitoring programs. Second, there is often a stronger imperative for a robust
connection with management and policy, given the species (or ecological
community) may be declining rapidly (Lindenmayer et al. 2013), be subject to
(sometimes experimental) management interventions, and could have a high
public profile. For these reasons, monitoring for threatened species and ecological
communities usually needs to be bespoke; generic approaches are likely to be
ill-fitting.