Assessment of Australia's Terrestrial Biodiversity 2008

Assessment of Australia's Terrestrial Biodiversity 2008 (PDF - 4.8 MB)

The key findings

• Many of Australia's biological assets are still in decline, and threats are ongoing and compounded by climate change.
• Progress has been made in the collaboration between national, and state and territory jurisdictions in improving Australia's biodiversity information.
• Despite this progress, there are insufficient data to report on national trends in important aspects of Australia's biodiversity.
• A range of useful monitoring systems exist at regional and state levels.
• Landscape-scale approaches are pivotal to long term biodiversity conservation successes, but there is a lack of effective and systematic monitoring systems at this scale that can be used for evaluation.
• The strengthening and consolidation of the regional delivery model for natural resource management (NRM) has assisted delivery of biodiversity outcomes.

Implications for future biodiversity assessments

This Assessment has highlighted the lack of many nationally consistent datasets to assess the status and trends of biodiversity in Australia, while showing that there are many instances of good datasets at a state and regional level.

To assist in national reporting of trends in biodiversity, all jurisdictions could:

• support strategic long-term monitoring of selected species and communities following agreed protocols
• support strategic research to establish empirical relationships between biodiversity and important surrogates, including native vegetation and wetlands
• support adaptive learning from major biodiversity management and conservation programs (including the reserves system, recovery actions, and threat abatement actions)
• support research into the impacts of climate change on biodiversity and its interactions with existing stressors, and
• support programs that build resilience in ecosystems, communities and species to threats to biodiversity.

Some dangers for ecology on the way to becoming a profession

The ecological profession should furnish members with standard minimum qualifications, codes of ethical conduct and discipline procedures for those breaking the code.

Such were the findings of an article published in the Australian Journal of Ecology in 1984 (Abstract). Yet a quarter of a century later, our profession is still unregulated. Poised on the edge of one of human-kind's worst ever catastrophes, climate change, can we any longer afford to be complacent?

In the recent EIANZ Annual Conference in Canberra, Bill Haylock (President, EIANZ) referred to meetings with the Commonwealth Environment Minister's advisors, forwarding concerns from the EPBC Act review process about poor standards in the profession. To what extent are we to blame for not encouraging good standards in each other? This is why EIANZ Ecology has started the process of developing certification standards for ecologists. We are aiming for the first round of recruitment to CEnvP in ecology by June next year.

Being part of this process is essential to the integrity of the ecological profession and for the future of the environment. We urge you to take a moment to visit Certification of Ecologists.

Here you will find the first round of results from a consultation on what skills and knowledge characterise an ecologist. This is an open Wiki so you may go in and edit / amend or add material. This process will be open until November 20th. After that, we begin the task of identifying assessment criteria.