404 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
of the silvicultural system was ignored by the Victorian Government forestry
agency for more than a decade (Lindenmayer et al. 2015b). The challenge therefore
is to build a constituency of supporters with management and policy responsibility
that have a strong interest in the work.
Consider the broader ecological and policy context for adaptive management
AM is a powerful approach to learning about a particular ecosystem, species,
threatening process or other entity. Irrespective of how well conceptualised,
designed and implemented AM may be, it is critical to be cognisant of the broader
ecological and political context. This is exemplified by the case study from the
Central Highlands of Victoria. In this case, the mountain ash ecosystem is now
listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN, and the ecosystem’s iconic mammal
species, Leadbeater’s possum has recently been uplisted to Critically Endangered
by the Australian Government’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity
Conservation Act 1999. These outcomes are a consequence of more than 40% of
the habitat of Leadbeater’s possum being destroyed in the 2009 wildfires, a
massive decline in the abundance of large old hollow-bearing trees, an enormous
reduction in the extent of old growth forest (to less than 1.2% of the estate or
1/30th–1/60th of historical levels) and widespread industrial clearfelling that
renders areas of forest unsuitable habitat for >150 years (Lindenmayer et al.
2015b). The major management and policy priority must be to set aside a large
ecological reserve and withdraw industrial logging from that ecosystem (Todd et
al. 2016; Taylor et al. 2017). Hence, alternative silvicultural systems will make
limited contributions to tackling the fundamental conservation problems that
characterise mountain ash forests, Leadbeater’s possum, and other threatened
species in that ecosystem. In hindsight, the AM experiment on alternative logging
regimes has been of limited immediate management relevance to the species it
was originally designed to help (Leadbeater’s possum), no matter how good the
quality of the science.
Lessons learned
Peer-reviewed AM studies are rare. Those that focus on threatened species are even
rarer. This chapter explains some of the reasons for that, by outlining some
challenges and learnings from a long-term AM experiment in the wet mountain
ash forests of the Central Highlands of Victoria, south-eastern Australia. These
learnings are:
● (^) Consider the ecological, and even political, context of AM studies.
● (^) Appraise whether other kinds of studies, rather than AM, might be more
appropriate for work on a given threatened species.