Distinguishing four types of monitoring based on the questions they address

Abstract

We describe and label four types of monitoring—surveillance, implementation, effectiveness, and ecological effects—that are designed to answer very different questions and achieve very different goals. Surveillance monitoring is designed to uncover change in target variables over space and time; implementation monitoring is designed to record whether management actions were applied as prescribed; effectiveness monitoring is designed to evaluate whether a given management action was effective in meeting a stated management objective; and ecological effects monitoring is designed to uncover unintended ecological consequences of management actions. Public land management agencies have focused heavily on implementation and effectiveness monitoring and very little on the more ecologically oriented surveillance and ecological effects monitoring. Tradeoffs, in the form of unintended ecological consequences, are important to consider in the management of natural resources, yet lack of ecological effects monitoring data has hindered our ability to fully understand these tradeoffs. Our proposed monitoring classification scheme offers practitioners and stakeholders a framework that explicitly identifies the type of monitoring they are conducting. We also suggest that, as a start, the effectiveness and ecological effects of a particular type of management activity can be approached rapidly and relatively inexpensively through use of a chronosequence approach to learning.