52 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
inf luences whether Australian threatened birds are monitored and the quality of
that monitoring, although we cannot say whether a recovery plan is more likely to
be written for birds that are being monitored or monitoring is more likely for birds
with recovery plans. A few examples suggest it is the former – monitoring of
fishing by-catch drove seabird conservation planning (Baker and Robertson 2018)
(Fig. 4.5), and long-term studies of shorebirds revealed losses that have precipitated
formal plans – but more formal analysis is warranted.
The nine metrics of monitoring quality suggest that collecting data is
undertaken with greater enthusiasm than applying the findings to management.
The high level of coordination among counts is partly because many bird taxa are
so rare that only one monitoring program is in place. However, it also ref lects the
extent to which those monitoring Australian birds at multiple sites have been
willing to share their data for the good of the birds. Malleefowl monitoring, for
instance, is coordinated among hundreds of people belonging to dozens of local
groups (Gillam et al. 2018) (Fig. 4.6). The high scores for sampling periodicity
ref lect both the enthusiasm of volunteers for searching for birds as well as the
longevity of many threatened taxa, which means that adequacy is still high even if
surveys are conducted at multi-year intervals.
Reporting, however, is often inadequate, the linkage to management
rudimentary and the data collection itself relatively simplistic, consisting only of
counts or distribution with little life history data that might explain trends
detected. These results suggest a need for a more balanced skill set among
monitoring teams so that those good at counting birds combine with others who
can analyse results and integrate them into management. One reason the quality of
monitoring of taxa with recovery plans tends to be superior may be the nature of
the coordination within such teams, many of which are embedded in skill
networks (Holmes et al. 2016), as well as providing a framework for use of
monitoring results.
In addition to many individual monitoring efforts, some groups of birds stand
out for the quality of monitoring. The first of these is the migratory shorebirds, all
of which have some level of monitoring at multiple sites around the country and
along the f lyway. The program was originally designed to count and map
shorebirds but has since proved instrumental in proving suspected declines
(Gosbell and Clemens 2006; Chapter 11). The second is the albatross and larger
petrel program, which developed after it was realised that large numbers were being
killed as by-catch to international fishing operations (Baker and Robertson 2018).
Knowledge about every albatross and large petrel species is now collected under an
international agreement: the Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and
Petrels. In the case of shorebirds, most work has been undertaken by volunteers;
for albatrosses and petrels, governments have supported the monitoring and
management, largely because most breeding islands are government reserves with