Characteristics of Australia's rangelands and key design issues for monitoring biodiversity

Abstract

Abstract We explored the key issues that are most likely to influence any set of guiding principles for developing biodiversity monitoring programmes in Australia's rangelands. We defined the Australian rangelands and came up with an overview of their climate extremes, land‐use pressures and biodiversity loss, and then focussed on issues underpinning the design phase of any monitoring programme. Using Noss's 1990 framework of compositional, structural and functional attributes of biodiversity and its new revisions by others, we showed how the elusive, abstract concept of biodiversity can be used to identify many measurable attributes that can form a minimum and necessary set of indicators for any biodiversity monitoring task. We then described the steps in the monitoring process, with a particular focus on the reasons for monitoring biodiversity as they strongly influence the selection of indicators. We concluded by compiling a table of key issues as background information for developing guiding principles (Table 4). The list is by no means an exhaustive list for the design phase but it does indicate that considerable attention needs to be given to this phase when developing monitoring programmes. We have intentionally not addressed the equally important issues associated with the planning and delivery phases of developing a monitoring programme, as Wallace et al. and Watson and Novelly cover these in their papers in the present issue of Austral Ecology.