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Community involvement in

monitoring threatened species: a

WWF perspective

Jessica Koleck

Summary

Communities are central to WWF-Australia’s (WWF) conservation mission, and
play an active and essential role in supporting, funding and conducting its
programs, including threatened species monitoring. Involving people delivers clear
benefits to threatened species conservation: enhancing value, effectiveness and
often increasing outputs, while generating inf luential community interest, support
and concern for threatened species and their habitats. People and groups involved
with WWF’s projects can gain from the experience, through education, self-
determination and socio-economic benefits. Engagement is particularly important
for projects involving Indigenous communities, where different objectives and
cultural sensitivities must be respected, and targeted outcomes can be more
diverse. In this chapter, WWF’s approach to engagement in threatened species
monitoring programs is outlined using two case studies. The Northern Bettong