The Victorian Government’s Management Improvement Initiative has emphasised accountability for performance through shifting the focus of programs and reporting from activities (resource inputs) to achievements (outputs and preferably outcomes).

Biodiversity is an inherently multi-faceted and complex area and sharpening the focus on achievements in its management is a challenging task that is being tackled in many places around the world. Species variously respond to ecological parameters in time and space but do not recognise human constructs in the environment like legal or administrative frameworks. Accordingly, conservation management routinely needs to take an across-tenure view of habitat requirements and to reconcile the diverse needs of native species and ecosystems with the diverse pursuits and priorities of the relevant land and resource managers. The Department of Natural Resources and Environment is responsible for this integration; in particular, the Flora and Fauna Program coordinates reporting back to the Government on the performance of biodiversity conservation programs.

The broad objectives of the Biodiversity Reporting Framework are to clarify the achievements of biodiversity conservation activities and to ensure that appropriate feedback on outcomes continually improves the design and targeting of programs.

The reporting systems being developed are based on integrated adaptive management and are intended to:

• readily support refinement of priorities and strategic approaches through continuous improvement;
• allow quantitative review of progress towards program goals;
• identify expected performance with respect to natural resource managers who share responsibility for achieving overall conservation targets for particular species and communities;
• allow hierarchical reporting of state-wide, bioregion-based or business-based trends;
• translate readily to national overviews including State of Environment reporting and the Montreal Process for forestry;
• successfully blend scientific rigour and affordability;
• promote broad understanding and the use of common knowledge and language;
• lead in the direction of adequate understanding of causal relationships.

The Adaptive Management Cycle for Biodiversity Conservation outlines the relationships between the activities that influence the efficiency and effectiveness of applied conservation management. Some activities are inputs to management (e.g. plans, standards), some are management actions (e.g. fencing some vegetation), some are environmental outcomes (e.g. increased cover of native vegetation) and others are biodiversity outcomes (e.g. increased population of target species due to habitat improvement).

While the ultimate focus is on biodiversity outcomes, each area of activity plays a key role in an integrated program and is worthy of reporting on as part of an overall performance assessment.

In the Adaptive Management Cycle for Biodiversity Conservation the areas of activity and associated performance indicators are:

Strategic direction — including the development of legislative and regulatory mechanisms, the preparation of strategies or policies for specific issues (e.g. grasslands, environmental weeds, environmental flows) and the development of standards through codes of practice (e.g. Timber Harvesting, Roading, Fire Management).

Inventory — improving the knowledge of assets, including their distribution, conservation status and ecological requirements. Performance indicators are based on relative completeness of inventories with respect to taxonomic groups, geographic coverage and vegetation community/habitat mapping.

Planning — including analyses of natural assets with respect to relative significance and threats; establishment of clear targets for management of the key assets at risk (specifying, for example, the number of breeding pairs of a threatened species to be supported; the area of ecological community in which natural processes will be maintained; the area of disturbed vegetation which will be restored or rehabilitated; the area and/or range of age classes of habitat to be maintained or created; the type of monitoring to be undertaken); and the development of management approaches to specific risks (e.g. conservation priority zoning schemes; predator, pest plant/animal or grazing pressure control programs; ecological burning or environmental flow regimes; applied research tasks).

Performance indicators are based on the coverage and quality of plans, which may be tenure-based (e.g. Forest Management Plans, Parks & Reserves Ecological Management Statements), issue-based (e.g. Catchment Management Authority Regional Vegetation Plans, Salinity Management Plans, Fire Management Plans), or asset-based (e.g. Flora & Fauna Guarantee Action Statements).

Management — including on-ground or at-sea actions across the full spectrum of natural resource management responsibilities. On public land and sea these will be specified in annual work programs, contracts and various forms of service agreement. Performance indicators are based on achievement of quantitative targets for generic tasks (e.g. area under active pest or predator control; area of rehabilitated or re-established vegetation; area burnt for specific ecological management objectives).

Note that results are a combination of planned actions, other actions that are unintended and possibly undesirable and, most significantly, of natural events including seasonal climate, disease outbreak, catastrophic fire or extreme weather effect.

Monitoring Actions — undertaking a strategic selection of monitoring activities which adequately cover the spectrum of management issues, and which use appropriate degrees of sophistication varying as follows:

• Qualitative Monitoring — the unstructured observation of changes in elements of biodiversity (e.g. opportunistic observation of pest plant/animal introduction or disease outbreak), or structured observations without quantitative design or intent (e.g. photopoints or paired plots intended only to visually illustrate changes);
• Surveillance Monitoring — the process of repetitive observations of one or more elements of biodiversity, according to pre-arranged schedules in time and space (e.g. annual population counts of a rare species at a particular locality);
• Research Monitoring — as in surveillance monitoring, but explicitly designed to understand the changes detected in terms of causal links to specific management actions or natural events (e.g. sampling of populations under differing management regimes with the statistical design power to link key factors);
• Risk-Based Assessment — the process of assigning magnitudes and probabilities to the adverse effects of human activities and/or catastrophic natural events; a process which seeks to use unambiguous quantitative endpoints by which to judge results of management

  Performance indicators are based on the number of management issues with appropriate monitoring programs and the achievement of annual targets for gathering the information required by these programs.

Environmental Outcomes Monitoring — including measures of environmental condition with a focus on physical features. Although not actual measures of biodiversity, these outcomes are directly relevant to habitat quality and are often the only features that can be readily assessed across whole systems. Performance indicators are based on some of the established indicators of health (e.g. extent and condition of vegetation cover, Index of Stream Condition, extent of pest plants).

Biodiversity Outcomes Monitoring — including measures of biodiversity condition selected from a matrix of features reflecting levels of organisation (landscape, ecological community, population, genetic) and different biodiversity attributes (composition, structure, function). Some measures will only be meaningful for a particular feature at a particular location (e.g. recovery of an individual population), whilst others can be aggregated with similar measures to generate indices (e.g. number of threatened species). Performance indicators are based on a variety of features, for example depletion/rehabilitation of extent and quality of specific vegetation communities or habitat types; population trends of sensitive/threatened/indicator species; retention of specified sites of significance; quantitative assessment of success in managing specific risks.

Implementation of the Biodiversity Reporting Framework is facilitating common and mutually beneficial approaches to monitoring across government businesses, other organisations and individuals that share responsibility for delivering and encouraging biodiversity conservation. Given the challenging nature of the task, integration through the specification of quality assurance standards and the use and development of common core datasets and indicators is essential. Establishing practical priorities and increased awareness of what different monitoring activities do and do not tell us is an important discipline to develop. Additionally, the Framework must integrate with related tasks that are undertaken in other resource management areas (e.g. the developing Decision Support System for Integrated Catchment Management and Sustainable Agriculture).

The bioregions used in Part II summarise ecological characteristics at the landscape scale, providing a sound and integrated geographic basis for clarifying responsibilities that are shared across various resource and land managers. Subsequently, strategic planning and on-ground management is undertaken from a variety of perspectives, each with a geographic focus relating to its logistical needs. Land management agencies and individuals hold tenure-based perspectives; issue-based perspectives are used, for example, with salinity management and fire management; and asset-based perspectives include planning for threatened species or ecological communities. Reporting on overall achievements in biodiversity is then most appropriately undertaken by returning to the bioregional framework.

Key Directions

• Implement the Biodiversity Reporting Framework, in cooperation with natural resource managers, to provide integrated feedback on the success of biodiversity conservation and management programs.
• Develop practical priorities for monitoring programs and quality assurance guidelines for monitoring techniques.
• Provide appropriate public access, for example through the NRE Website, to information that summarises achievements in biodiversity conservation on a bioregional basis.
• Increase the proportion of overall land and water resources directed to monitoring and reporting, and shift the focus of these activities from efficiency to effectiveness measures.