Where to Focus the Monitoring Effort

For all but the smallest areas of habitat, it is both impractical and inefficient to attempt to monitor all of the vegetation. Our alternatives are a) to take a random sample from across the whole habitat and use statistical inference to draw conclusions about its overall condition (Chapter 5) or b) to monitor in selected areas and use logic (or our knowledge of the inter-relationship between different parts of the habitat) to infer the condition elsewhere. This chapter outlines the factors that can guide our decisions on where to monitor if we choose the latter approach. Before deciding where to focus our monitoring effort, we should not only have a map showing the present distribution of the habitat, but also a map showing desired distribution of the habitat and unambiguous definitions of the desired habitat states. This much is true whether we are planning to use a statistical or selective method. It is important to remember however, that irrespective of the size of the site, land management will be applied at the level of the individual enclosure or management block. A landscape-scale conservation project can only succeed if each individual landowner knows what the management of their land is expected to deliver and where. The same is true of monitoring projects. If the aim of the monitoring is to feed back into management, then we must be able to interpret the results at the scale of the individual management units. This is a problem for monitoring projects based on random sampling methods because, unless there are enough randomly distributed samples within each management unit, the monitoring cannot provide feedback to the individual site managers. For example, if we apply a random sample across the whole area of habitat, our monitoring result is only likely to indicate the overall condition of the habitat. If the sampling area comprises two or more management units, we are unlikely to have enough samples in any single management unit to derive a statistically significant result. Therefore, we will not be able to provide feedback to any land manager on the condition of the habitat on their