4 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
monitoring, delivered via partnerships between government, scientists, managers
and citizen scientists, particularly from BirdLife Australia (e.g. The Bird Atlas
Project, Shorebirds 2020). Finally, the Atlas of Living Australia (www.ala.org.au),
which has become a valuable central point for national biodiversity data, has
managed to overcome many of the challenges of gathering fragmented and disparate
datasets that would similarly affect biodiversity monitoring data. However, these
programs do not deliver the sort of information necessary to properly prioritise,
trigger and inform actions to recover threatened species.
A current research project, funded by the National Environmental Science
Programme (Threatened Species Recovery Hub) is attempting to develop a
National Threatened Species Index (initially, for birds) that will track changes in
population-level data over time, by collating disparate information from multiple
sources (http://www.nespthreatenedspecies.edu.au/projects/national-and-regional-
monitoring-for-threatened-species). If sufficient monitoring data are available to be
mined, the Index could become an indicator of the status of biodiversity analogous
to existing economic indicators, such as GDP. Although the Index will not solve
the underlying problems of the scarcity of monitoring data and the lack of
coordination among monitoring programs, it should promote improvements in
national monitoring by highlighting current deficiencies.
Robust policy/legislative support
The importance of monitoring, in a general sense, is recognised in Australia’s
overarching national biodiversity policy. Australia’s first national biodiversity
policy (Australian and New Zealand Environment and Conservation Council
1996) included a target to implement ‘a nationally coordinated program for long-
term monitoring of the state of Australia’s biological diversity and the impact of
threatening processes’ by 2000. This target was not met. Australia’s second (and
current) Biodiversity Conservation Strategy (2010–30) (Natural Resource
Management Ministerial Council 2010) again recognised the importance of
monitoring for biodiversity conservation, and again included a target to establish
national long-term biodiversity monitoring by 2015. Once again, this target was not
met (Commonwealth of Australia 2016). Neither of these successive policy
documents singled out threatened biodiversity and the critical contribution that
monitoring can make to supporting, and documenting, recovery.
One of the purposes of the Biodiversity Conservation Strategy is to align
national policy with international agreements, and the omission of explicit
reference to threatened species (and their management and monitoring) in our
successive biodiversity strategies creates a point of dissonance for Australia’s
international reporting obligations. For example, the UN Convention on Biological
Diversity (www.cbd.int/sp/default.shtml) includes a target relating to threatened