3 – The extent and adequacy of monitoring for Australian threatened mammal species^27without any cross-site synthesis); management linkages (2.0; most monitoring
activity was undertaken without obvious or explicit management context);
coverage (2.1; most monitoring activity occurred at few sites); and design quality
(2.1; most monitoring activity had little explicit consideration of its capability to
detect trends).
In general, and understandably, there was better coordination in monitoring
efforts for taxa that are restricted to a single jurisdiction. There is little or no
national coordination of monitoring programs and reporting for species that occur
in multiple jurisdictions or for species monitored by different government agencies
and non-government organisations.
Summing monitoring tallies over all nine metrics (i.e. with a maximum
possible score of 45) of this evaluation framework, monitoring adequacy was
greater for non-volant species (marsupials and rodents: mean score 20.3) than for
bats (mean score 10.8; Mann–Whitney U test, z = 3.63, P <0.0001), due perhaps in
part to the specialised techniques required for bat monitoring and the relatively
small number of bat researchers.
Monitoring also tended to be more adequate for species listed as threatened
under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC
Act) than for the unlisted taxa (e.g. species listed as threatened or Near Threatened
by the IUCN but not listed under the EPBC Act) included in Table 3.1 (mean score
13.9 for unlisted taxa; 23.5 for taxa listed as Vulnerable; 26.0 for Endangered and
24.8 for Critically Endangered; rs = 0.44, P <0.01). However the interpretation of
this relationship is ambiguous: it may be that listing helps deliver monitoring
programs; alternatively, species may be more likely to be listed if there are robust
trend data deriving from pre-existing monitoring programs. Monitoring was also
more adequate for taxa that have (or have had) a national recovery plan than for
those for which no plan has been made (mean score of 24.7 for taxa with recovery
plans and 14.9 for those without; Mann–Whitney U test, z = 5.33, P <0.0001).
For a few terrestrial taxa, monitoring rates highly on most of the criteria
considered. These are mostly high profile species with relatively substantial
management investments such as the Tasmanian devil Sarcophilus harrisii
(Hollings et al. 2016) and Leadbeater’s possum Gymnobelideus leadbeateri (Chapter
14; Lindenmayer et al. 2011), and taxa that are extremely restricted and with very
small population sizes, for which monitoring may be relatively simple and
inexpensive: examples include northern hairy-nosed wombat Lasiorhinus krefftii
(Banks et al. 2003) and the Victorian population of eastern barred bandicoot
Perameles gunnii (Hill et al. 2010).
Most of the monitoring activity identified in this chapter was undertaken by
state and territory agencies (122 taxa), followed by non-government conservation
organisations (notably the Australian Wildlife Conservancy) (53) and university
researchers (53), with monitoring for a few species undertaken by Commonwealth