Effective Ecological Monitoring

Reviews

"Throughout the book, the authors make a compelling argument for the necessity of defensible monitoring programs to achieve conservation and management goals."
Barry R. Noon, Biological Conservation 229, 2019

"This is a highly readable book. The authors’ combined expertise in this area is formidable and their views, even when based on personal experience. Overall, this book will be important reading for anyone involved with ecological monitoring – whether planning, conducting, evaluating, publishing, or in a position to fund it."
Phil Stephens, The Niche Magazine, June 2019

Features

• Provides a sound framework and tips for planning and running an effective ecological monitoring program
• Uses case studies to explore what makes a monitoring program successful or unsuccessful
• Break out boxes discuss key concepts and questions
• Draws from the authors’ 80 years of collective experience in running high-quality monitoring programs

Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface to Second Edition
1: Introduction
Some of the ecological values and uses of long-term datasets
Poor record of long-term ecological monitoring
Why we wrote this book
2: Why monitoring fails
Characteristics of ineffective monitoring programs
Other factors contributing to ineffective monitoring programs
3: What makes long-term monitoring effective?
Characteristics of effective monitoring programs
Little things matter a lot! Some 'tricks of the trade'
The adaptive monitoring framework
4: The problematic, the effective and the ugly – some case studies
The problematic
The effective
Need to wait and see
The ugly
5: The upshot – our general conclusions
Changes in culture needed to facilitate monitoring
Good things that can come from non-question based monitoring
The role of citizen science in long-term monitoring
The challenge of intellectual property and data sharing
The challenges in effective monitoring of rare, threatened and endangered species
The major challenge of keeping monitoring and long-term studies going
The big issue of integrating different kinds of monitoring
Approaches to integrate data from different kinds of monitoring
Index
View the full table of contents (PDF, 604kb).

Authors

David Lindenmayer is a Research Professor at The Australian National University who has specialised in established large-scale, long-term ecological monitoring and research programs that have extended for more than 35 years in many different parts of south-eastern Australia.

Professor Gene Likens is one of the world’s most highly decorated scientists and widely recognised for his pioneering and ground-breaking work on acid rain in north-eastern USA.