324 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
directed by, Indigenous people. It is important to anticipate power relationships
that may evolve within these partnerships, and ensure that the Indigenous partner
retains a level of autonomy and that their rights and control of customary estates is
respected (Bohensky et al. 2013). Key to ongoing participation is securing funding
for development, initial training and education of people collecting data and salary
for Indigenous people to continue monitoring work. To keep collaborators
engaged, there needs to be regular reporting on the programs outcomes that is
targeted to the interest of each program partner.
Two case studies of threatened species monitoring by Indigenous Rangers in
the Australian deserts are presented in this chapter.
Case study 1: monitoring of the greater bilby Macrotis lagotis
Indigenous people have a key role to play in securing the persistence of the greater
bilby, which is now largely restricted to Aboriginal owned or managed land in the
arid west of Australia. Although the bilby was formerly found across the majority
of the Australian continent south of the tropics, it has declined to just 20% of its
former range in response to a range of interacting threatening processes including
land modification, predation by foxes and cats, inappropriate fire regimes and
competition with rabbits (Southgate et al. 2007). As a result, the bilby is classified
as Vulnerable to extinction under Commonwealth (federal) legislation. A robust
monitoring program is needed to assess whether the bilby is continuing to contract
in range, and to consolidate approaches to management to secure populations.
The bilby is a charismatic species that most people readily engage with. It has
spiritual significance to many Indigenous people, and was historically an important
resource both for food and adornment. Many Aboriginal people, especially those in
the deserts, possess detailed knowledge pertaining to bilbies. This knowledge
includes experiential knowledge from a person’s own observations combined with
those of previous generations, as well as cultural knowledge from the Jukurrpa
songs. For example, the bilby dreaming story that traverses the Kiwirrkurra
Indigenous Protected Area lists at least two key species of witchetty grub host plants
that bilbies are known to target for food (R. Paltridge, unpublished).
In Indigenous communities where people regularly spend time hunting, there
may be extensive knowledge of the local bilby distribution available to guide the
mapping of populations. People may also be able to describe recent changes in the
local distribution based on a community’s collective knowledge, but may be unsure of
the underlying causes and have limited knowledge of distributional and/or population
changes at greater scales. Complementary monitoring programs that combine
Indigenous and Western approaches are being carried out by Indigenous Ranger
teams with the aim of collecting more quantitative data to assess local population
status, and ultimately disentangle the factors that are inf luencing bilby persistence.