The challenges of long-term monitoring

Abstract

book reviews ISSN 1948-6596 The challenges of long-term monitoring Biodiversity and Environmental Change: Monitoring, Challenges and Direction. David Lindenmayer, Emma Burns, Nicole Thurgate & Andrew Lowe (Editors), 2014, CSIRO Publishing. 624 pp. AU$120.00 (hardback) ISBN:9780643108561; http://www.publish.csiro.au/ At a time of intense and innovative use of eco- logical datasets, obstacles to acquisition and archiving of fundamental long-term data re- main as pervasive as ever. As pointed out in this volume, effective long-term monitoring should extend over 10 years or more, have a well designed structure, a carefully thought out resampling strategy and secure funding. Cur- rent trends in how science is done work against this ideal. Public agencies and research institu- tions, which used to do the bulk of long-term monitoring, are now under great pressure to achieve efficiencies and to devote more effort and resources to immediate concerns. Univer- sity scientists, as a whole, are disinclined to invest in monitoring other than on a limited and short-term scale: the pressures to publish are too great and the rewards for basic data collection too meagre. Research funding agen- cies and highly ranked journals are fixated on innovative, ground-breaking research and of- ten explicitly exclude projects and papers mainly concerned with basic data or observa- tions. None of this can be wished away. The current situation is the product of thousands of individual decisions made by policy makers, managers and scientists. The consequence? ‘The recent and current reality of envi- ronmental reporting and environmental deci- sion making is that supporting data and evi- dence are rarely used.’ (from the Preface). The implications of this astounding state- ment should give us pause. Is evidence really regarded as irrelevant? While the multiple en- vironmental crises that afflict the globe may eventually force a radical rethink of our atti- tudes to ecological data, the immediate chal- lenge is how to sustain biodiversity monitoring in the meantime. This handsome, beautifully produced vol- ume shows how Australian ecologists have risen to the challenge. It is based in large part on work coordinated through the Australian Government’s Terrestrial Ecosystem Network – an Australia-wide collaboration between land management agencies, government depart- ments and universities. Within the TERN net- work is LTERN (Long Term Ecological Research Network) a collaborative enterprise that coor- dinates and makes available the data from 35 core studies comprising nearly 3000 long term plots and which forms a part of the Interna- tional Long Term Ecological Research (ILTER) network. Once a scientific monitoring group joins LTERN, they agree to share data and as- pire to certain standards while pursuing the diverse goals, targets and approaches appropri- ate to their sites and problems. It is a prag- matic response to the huge task of monitoring the vast Australian landscape and its hyperdi- verse biota. This book showcases the results of these independent approaches. David Lindenmayer, who led the editorial team, is an international figure in long term monitoring. Over the past 30 years he has pub- lished prolifically on the subject, deriving much of his inspiration from his own practical in- volvement in the day to day challenges of monitoring. The general overview chapters he leads here are impressive summaries of the LTERN enterprise and reflect his sustained thinking on the hows and whys of monitoring. They are essential reading for anyone contem- plating a monitoring project. The bulk of the book consists of a series of chapters setting the Australian scene and then moving systemati- cally through nine terrestrial biomes ranging from alpine communities to tropical rainforest. Each biome chapter is clearly set out with an overview, conceptual model of the major proc- esses and drivers, exposition of threatening processes, major trends and cases studies from the LTERN core sites. Extra material is included as boxes on a wide variety of other topics and frontiers of biogeography 6.3, 2014 — © 2014 the authors; journal compilation © 2014 The International Biogeography Society