35 – Essential principles to guide monitoring of threatened biodiversity^431Chapters 25–29 provide case studies that highlight the potential benefits of
involving the broader community, including citizen scientists, in monitoring
programs. Participation by community groups, volunteers and Indigenous people
provides important contributions to monitoring in terms of knowledge, skills,
implementation and advocacy. Community involvement in monitoring can
enhance program longevity and increase geographic reach (e.g. Chapter 31).
Difficulties in monitoring in remote areas can be alleviated by partnering with
local communities (Chapter 25, 26, 27). Volunteers can collect more data than
might otherwise be collected by limited budgets (Chapter 26, 28). The many hands
and eyes contributing to monitoring can improve detectability and data processing
(e.g. Chapter 27). Working with local community and landowners can further
enhance the relevance of monitoring to the community, and help elicit more
holistic management approaches that take into account community perspectives
and values (e.g. Chapter 25, 27, 28). People within natural resource management
and conservation organisations are also important partners, because they are
typically decision makers, determine funding, and may also lead the planning,
designing, implementing and management of the program. Ongoing and regular
communication during the program will be important to maintain relationships
with stakeholders, as well as to provide updates on the results, better inform
decision making (Principle 2) and demonstrate the value of monitoring (Principle
5). Engagement with the broader public is also crucial to help build support and
ensure continued funding for monitoring threatened biodiversity.
Principle 2. Integrate monitoring with management
If monitoring threatened biodiversity is to be effective and inf luential in shaping
conservation outcomes, it must be embedded within, or at least clearly linked to,
management. This connection must outline the process for how monitoring data
are used to inform management action (i.e. decision making), and enable potential
pathways for management to inf luence species population trajectories to be
defined. If monitoring is not explicitly embedded within a management
framework, data may not be acted upon by management agencies (e.g.
Lindenmayer et al. 2013), and monitoring programs may remain ignorant of
management objectives or actions that that may be in direct conf lict with
conservation goals.
A useful framework that many management agencies adopt to facilitate
integration of monitoring within management is the monitoring, evaluation and
reporting (MER) framework (e.g. Chapter 17, OEH 2016). The MER framework is a
process that uses monitoring to inform decision making by defining strategic
directions and priorities, outlining uncertainty between objectives and actions,
designing monitoring to deal with uncertainty, and evaluating data to update and
improve our knowledge of how the threatened species’ system operates. It is a
cyclical process that requires constant evaluation of knowledge to ensure that