Opinion
Monitoring for conservation

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Human-mediated environmental changes have resulted in appropriate concern for the conservation of ecological systems and have led to the development of many ecological monitoring programs worldwide. Many programs that are identified with the purpose of ‘surveillance’ represent an inefficient use of conservation funds and effort. Here, we revisit the 1964 paper by Platt and argue that his recommendations about the conduct of science are equally relevant to the conduct of ecological monitoring programs. In particular, we argue that monitoring should not be viewed as a stand-alone activity, but instead as a component of a larger process of either conservation-oriented science or management. Corresponding changes in monitoring focus and design would lead to substantial increases in the efficiency and usefulness of monitoring results in conservation.

Section snippets

Monitoring, efficiency and Platt (1964)

It has been four decades since the publication of ‘Strong inference’ by Platt [1], which dealt broadly with the conduct of science, focusing on the crucially important step of discriminating among competing hypotheses. He criticized the unfocused collection of detailed data that are perhaps generally relevant to the investigation, but not directed at hypothesis discrimination. His paper has been hugely influential and is widely cited as an important contribution to the philosophy and conduct of

Monitoring for active conservation

As an active process of decision making to achieve objectives, conservation is rooted in decision theory, sharing an intellectual foundation with many other disciplines 2, 3. Essential elements in a framework for informed decision making include objectives, potential management actions, models of system response to management actions, measures of confidence in the models, and a monitoring program providing estimates of system state and possibly other relevant variables 4, 5, 6. There are

Monitoring for science

In some situations, the monitoring of a biological system is needed before active management, so as to improve the biological understanding on which such management can be based. In such cases, the focus of monitoring is not necessarily to make state-dependent decisions or assess the degree to which conservation objectives are being met. Rather, it is to produce estimates of system status and other attributes that can be compared against model-based predictions for the explicit purpose of

Surveillance monitoring

Surprisingly, monitoring for decision making or science does not appear to be widely used in conservation biology. Instead, a different approach is taken, involving omnibus surveillance monitoring of biological populations and communities [9]. Surveillance monitoring is frequently characterized as ‘omnibus’ because of its potential use for many different purposes and its inclusion of many different species and locations. However, it is not a focus on multiple species and large areas that

A critique of surveillance monitoring

Surveillance monitoring in conservation typically involves a two-step process. First, population declines are identified by means of a statistical test of a null hypothesis of no decline versus a decline. Following the statistical detection of a decline, either of two actions is recommended as a second step. One is to initiate active conservation immediately, and the other is to initiate studies to understand the ‘cause’ of the decline, followed by active conservation. Key to both is the

Surveillance monitoring: arguments and rejoinders

Proponents of surveillance monitoring often emphasize the use of trend estimates for planning and setting conservation priorities, with the declines found through monitoring used to prioritize follow-up actions [13]. However, substantive declines are frequently recognized through information sources other than surveillance monitoring. In fact, surveillance monitoring typically provides weak inferences about species that are neither abundant nor widespread, the very species that are most in need

Caveats

The most difficult aspect of our recommendation is the need to develop detailed hypotheses and associated models of system response to management actions. Hypotheses about the dynamics of biological populations and communities are likely to be more complex than many of the hypotheses considered by Platt [1]. Hypotheses about responses of communities and ecosystems will typically involve numerous interactions and will probably be especially difficult to develop. Even with single populations, the

Conclusions

If surveillance monitoring can be an inefficient use of scarce conservation funding, it also can become a form of political and intellectual displacement behavior [22], or worse, a deliberate delaying tactic. We are all familiar with situations in which declarations of a need for ‘more study’ appear to be stalling tactics, with crucial actions delayed for reasons that have little to do with information needs. From a somewhat less cynical perspective, it is much easier to postpone a difficult

Acknowledgements

We thank Steve Buckland, Paul Doherty, Mike Runge, John Sauer and Nigel Yoccoz for providing constructive criticisms and comments on early drafts of this article. We also thank various other colleagues, some who share our views and many who do not, for discussions of ecological monitoring and conservation. We thank Mark Koneff for useful discussions and for the photograph in Figure I, Box 2.

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