340 Monitoring Threatened Species and Ecological Communities
the most obvious is the health and fitness of individual volunteers. Failing eyesight,
heart conditions, dodgy knees and hips can be limiting factors when the mind is
willing but the body is not. This can be an issue when monitoring sites are difficult
to access, or the hours required are long or strenuous. As a result, there can be
major workplace health and safety obstacles for bodies such as TFL or DEWNR,
which are responsible for managing volunteers.
Another factor that varies considerably between volunteers is their capacity to
use or adapt to new technology. GPS equipment, data loggers and specialist apps
are changing rapidly and greatly reducing the time needed to capture and process
monitoring data, but volunteers are not always able to keep up with technological
advances, which in turn has the potential to compromise the integrity of the
monitoring data being collected. On the other hand, some volunteers are
enthusiastic tech-adaptors, and their personal acquisitions can put agency
resources to shame! The provision of training for volunteers in the use of new
difficult to decipher, if the collector has started using their own code of
abbreviations, or mixing terms (e.g. aborted/spent/wilted). Although many orchid
enthusiasts have exceptional ID skills, not all do, and few have the rigorous
taxonomic expertise ideally required for identifying the more cryptic orchids. This
means there can be incorrect IDs, which affects the integrity of the data. If
volunteers have any doubts about the species’ identity, they are encouraged to
photograph the plant and check with the project officer.
As more people volunteer to help with monitoring, site location information is
being passed on to more and more people. In an ideal world, this should not be an
issue, since much of the site information is now freely available on websites such as
the Atlas of Living Australia, and the more sensitive sites have been excluded or
‘blurred’. However, with more volunteers gaining on-ground access to sensitive
sites, it is an unfortunate fact that occasionally some of the particularly rare or
attractive orchids have been dug up.
Volunteers working alone will sometimes take it upon themselves to perform
actions that would not be sanctioned by a recovery team. For example, some
orchid enthusiasts routinely hand pollinate flowers if they perceive a population to
be in decline. For the more common species this may be of little concern, but for
many of the EPBC-listed species the genetic consequences can be detrimental, with
potential for inbreeding depression, low diversity or introduction of genetically
unsuitable material (e.g. recessive genes) from other sites. Even if the impact is not
negative, it is likely to have gone undocumented by the recovery team, which can
skew the data collected.
The above mentioned issues such as compromised integrity of data or
undocumented hand pollination are easily dealt with by providing regular training
sessions for the volunteers. The illegal removal of orchids is a more serious problem
and more difficult to manage, with no obvious solution at this stage.