22 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
The most adequate monitoring was for high-profile species with much
management investment or species with very few individuals and a localised
distribution. Most monitoring was done by state agencies, and less by non-
government conservation organisations and university researchers. The current
inadequacy of monitoring will lead to poor conservation outcomes. In some cases,
monitoring programs have demonstrated the recovery of threatened mammal
species in response to effective management, and such evidence of success is
instrumental for ongoing investment and community support.
Introduction
Population monitoring is a critical component of threatened species management.
Good monitoring programs can: provide the definitive evidence required to assess
and review the conservation status of a species; indicate the relative impacts of
different putative threats and hence help direct management response; measure the
effectiveness of, and hence help refine, management actions; and indicate the level
of urgency that is required for management intervention. Monitoring can also
provide important opportunities for public involvement in research and
management, and provides the basis for public reporting on, and increasing
awareness of, the status of threatened species.
Monitoring is particularly important for Australia’s mammal species. This
fauna has experienced an exceptionally high rate of extinction and decline
(Woinarski et al. 2014, 2015), with many episodes – some recent and ongoing – of
very rapid and extensive decline (Woinarski et al. 2001, 2010). Given such
propensity for rapid decline, effective monitoring for Australian mammals is
particularly important to provide early warnings, to identify the factors responsible
for the decline and to position managers to respond before populations become
critically low.
However, there are some notable difficulties with the development,
implementation and interpretation of monitoring programs for Australian
mammal species. Many species are difficult to detect, and this problem is typically
exacerbated as a species becomes increasingly rare. Furthermore, many species
occur mostly in areas remote from population centres (e.g. beaked whales,
marsupial moles). Particularly for such groups of species, monitoring may be
expensive, and such cost may be seen by politicians, bureaucrats and managers to
be a lower priority than the implementation of management that is assumed to be
remedial. In order to interpret trends, many monitoring programs also require the
context of long-term consistency and continuity in their implementation,
rendering them unattractive to many research institutions and funding sources
whose focus is often instead on discrete, short-term projects with more immediate
outputs. This problem may be particularly acute for the mammal fauna of arid and