Project background and summary:

There is a long-standing need for reliable surveillance of national trends in ecosystem health and wildlife populations, to support decision-making and reporting in environmental and natural resource management across Australia.

This project aims to help address this need by developing a framework to identify a national set of non-avian fauna indicator species. We will first compile a meta-database of existing fauna monitoring across the continent, with attributes that can be used to develop and apply a prioritisation framework for indicator selection. The development of a draft national set of fauna indicator species will involve transparent evaluation of trade-offs between different species and monitoring methods, based on attributes such as required effort and investment, power to detect change and capacity to produce reliable trends across geographies and threats. A more detailed description of the project can be found HERE.

This project is part of a suite of activities being managed by the Australian Government Department of Environment  in an effort to build up Australia’s ecosystem surveillance capacity. Other projects include enhancements to existing capacities in TERN-Ausplots and Birdlife Australia.

Your help is needed:

We are currently establishing a national meta-database of fauna monitoring projects, based on published literature, publically accessible databases and non-published information from researchers and monitoring practitioners. The information we need to conduct the prioritisation is generally not available in the public domain (e.g. in publications). We have therefore compiled a short suvey to collect information on spatial locations, monitoring methods, and targeted species for biodiversity monitoring projects across Australia for this project, and any others you may be involved in and a very short form were you can give us contact details for projects you know of but are not involved in.

Are you involved in a monitoring project yourself?

We invite you to participate by completing the full survey here: https://sccs.formstack.com/forms/nerp_australian_monitoring_survey . More information including ethics approval can be found HERE.

Do you know of any current monitoring programs or someone we could contact and invite to take the full survey other than yourself?

If you know someone that is involved in a fauna survey activity that has been running for a while, please take two minutes to fill THIS FORM or contact us with suggestions of how we can best follow up with this person to inform him or her about our project and invite to take our survey.

Further information

Dr Megan Barnes
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
NERP Environmental Decisions Hub
The University of Queensland

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