1 – Introduction: making it count^7To a limited extent, national Recovery Teams have delivered taxon-specific
aspects of national leadership. However, even that contribution has dwindled over
the past decade as funding and policy support for the development and
implementation of Recovery Plans has diminished. As mentioned above, national
policy directives to establish national monitoring programs (Commonwealth of
Australia 2016; Natural Resource Management Ministerial Council 2010) have not
resulted in meaningful action. To tackle this stalemate, we suggest ‘starting small’
with a two-pronged approach:
- Establish a national monitoring program for a relatively small group of
threatened species or ecological communities. This group could include some
Priority Species identified in the Government’s Threatened Species Strategy
(Commonwealth of Australia 2015), with species and/or a monitoring context
that are of interest to the broader public and potential funders for
co-investment (to augment core Government funding). The purpose of this
program is not to act as a surrogate for threatened biodiversity monitoring
more generally, but to provide proof of concept. An example for such an
initiative could be a monitoring program for threatened vertebrates (and their
main threats: invasive species and fire) across Australia’s arid and semi-arid
zones, based partly on sand plot monitoring that is already being carried out by
Indigenous groups who are particularly skilled in this technique, and who are
responsible for the land management of much of this vast area. - Develop a pragmatic and low-cost program to assimilate and analyse
qualitative information on trends in threatened species and ecological
communities and the effectiveness of conservation interventions, as a
complement to more formal monitoring programs, which tend to have a
relatively narrow taxonomic and/or geographic scope. This could be achieved
using a simple and consistent reporting template to harvest qualitative
information regularly (e.g. every 2 years) on trends for each species or
ecological community from all relevant experts and stakeholders (in state
agencies, NGOs, community groups and Indigenous groups) (Burgman 2015).
This harvest of information could take place via online inputs and be managed
by the Commonwealth Department of Environment and Energy. It would
provide some assessments of population trends for most species, and also
indicate those species for which no reliable information about trends is
available (and hence for which more scrutiny is required). This program cannot
substitute for a nationally coordinated and standardised program based on
field sampling, but it could ‘fill the gap’ until such a national monitoring
program is established, and it could highlight some of the key issues that a
national monitoring program would need to consider.