318 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
technologies provide opportunities to monitor in ways never achieved before.
However, their false positive and negative error rates, and their overall cost-
effectiveness compared with traditional methods needs to be carefully considered.
The sheer number of decisions regarding the design of monitoring programs
for threatened biodiversity, combined with the uncertain outcomes of each, makes
it difficult to state a priori which design is best. Chapter 20 demonstrates that there
are ways to test – ahead of time – how well a monitoring design might meet the
fundamental objectives. In this chapter, a power analysis was performed on a
faunal monitoring program in northern Australia to assess the performance of
alternative monitoring designs at detecting future declines in threatened species.
Power analysis is a useful tool because it can reveal whether a new or existing
monitoring design is likely to achieve an objective, how resources can best be
allocated to maximise the chance of meeting an objective and how much
additional funding is needed to achieve a sufficient level of statistical power. This
information can justify existing monitoring programs, identify when further
resources are needed and test the performance of new technologies. Unfortunately,
power analysis is under-utilised when designing or evaluating threatened species
monitoring programs.
These two sections demonstrate some of the tools and approaches available to
managers, but too few threatened species monitoring programs are adequately
designed, justified or resourced to achieve their fundamental objectives (see
Chapters 3–8). Statistical power to detect any meaningful changes in populations is
often low, severely limiting the usefulness of data collected. Inadequate monitoring
is partly due to failing to properly define the fundamental objectives during the
design phase of monitoring, and failing to articulate how monitoring informs
management. Chapters 16–23 illustrate that a suite of quantitative tools and
statistical approaches can help rationalise resource prioritisation, account for biases
during data collection, and inform whether a monitoring design is likely to detect
meaningful changes in populations. Awareness, and treatment of, detectability is
improving, but adoption of other approaches such as power analysis and EVPI is
poor. Inadequately designed monitoring programs for threatened species can have
dire consequences – not only can they waste resources but can result in extinction
if we cannot detect declines as they occur.