428 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
(and support from) the broader community. Clear guidance for both managers and
monitoring practitioners is needed if we are to overcome these challenges and
avoid the catastrophic consequences of absent or ineffective monitoring (e.g.
species declines or extinction unnoticed because of inadequate data, and/or
ineffectual links between monitoring and management action). This chapter
presents the collective wisdom and experience from 26 threatened species
monitoring practitioners and propose five principles that should be considered
when designing monitoring programs for threatened species and ecological
communities. These are: (1) engage people; (2) integrate monitoring with
management; (3) plan, design and implement a fit-for-purpose monitoring
program; (4) ensure good data management; and (5) communicate the value of
monitoring. Our principles provide a clear framework in which to implement
robust monitoring of threatened species and ecological communities in a way that
guides management and enhances threatened biodiversity conservation outcomes,
including avoiding extinctions.
Introduction
Monitoring is an essential part of improving the conservation status of threatened
species and ecological communities. It is required to detect trends in abundance
and distribution – information that is a basic measure of the status of the species or
ecological communities, as well as a prerequisite for enabling legislative protection
and for justifying investment in conservation actions. Monitoring allows the
impacts of threatening processes to be quantified, thus guiding appropriate
conservation interventions. It ensures that the effectiveness of management actions
can be evaluated, thus improving management response and decision making.
Importantly, monitoring enables meaningful engagement with the public, funding
bodies, managers and policy makers.
Monitoring does not necessarily guarantee a species or ecological community
will not go extinct, or that it will recover, or that the causes of decline will be
accurately diagnosed. However, an effective monitoring program can reduce the
chances of decline or extinction going unnoticed and unmanaged. It can further
provide useful knowledge for evaluating declines in other species or ecological
communities subject to similar threatening processes. However, it is apparent from
ongoing declines and extinctions in Australia that current monitoring programs,
by and large, are not having the required impact on conservation outcomes
(Martin et al. 2012; Lindenmayer et al. 2013; Woinarski et al. 2017). Chapters 3–8
in this book further make the compelling case that monitoring across vertebrate
groups and ecological communities in Australia is inadequate. High proportions of
threatened taxa in each group are not monitored at all, and where monitoring does
occur there are often major problems. These include: (1) poor sampling coverage