Evaluating the performance of a centralised government geodatabase in capturing publicly-funded natural resource management activities in Victoria, Australia

Abstract

Over the past two decades the Australian government has invested billions of dollars into restoring and conserving Australia's environment and natural resources. However, audits of major programs have, in many cases, found it hard to verify where money was spent, let alone estimate what ecological impact it achieved. In Victoria, the Catchment Activity Management System (CAMS) – a centralised geodatabase intended to capture information about on-ground natural resource management (NRM) works – was developed around 2000 to enable uniform reporting at regional and state levels. The advent of this system was lauded for its potential to streamline reporting, but also to facilitate monitoring of the effectiveness of those projects. We evaluated the representation of native vegetation protection, revegetation and remnant restoration activities in CAMS by comparing these data to equivalent, independently generated data from three catchment management regions. The CAMS database captured just over half of the relevant works directly co-funded by government as spatial records. Since these accounted for approximately two-thirds of the total area of publicly co-funded works for that period, it follows that smaller sites were more likely to have been omitted from CAMS. Although the entry of works into CAMS only became encouraged in 2001, each CMA had undertaken some back-filling of the database and those sites that were included in CAMS were typically accurately mapped and located. Although our aim was not to recommend what information might be collected in CAMS to improve the ecological reporting, we believe our review will help inform that purpose. Given that many basic fields within the database remain unpopulated, consideration should be given to how those who collect the data could be encouraged to undertake diligent collection of more complex information that might be required to inform ecological change analyses.