Develop a Good Monitoring Program
Monitoring and good records are key to knowing how restoration treatments are altering the ecosystem and understanding the changes. The more complex the system, or the more carefully you wish to manage it, the more elaborate monitoring and records must be
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Develop a Good Monitoring Program The only thing that is constant is change. Heraclitus
Monitoring and good records are key to knowing how restoration treatments are altering the ecosystem and understanding the changes. The more complex the system, or the more carefully you wish to manage it, the more elaborate monitoring and records must be. Pilots are taught to take monitoring very seriously and keep careful records; dozens of conditions are continually monitored on a large plane. It is no less essential to monitor ecosystems. Although ecosystems are infinitely more complex than a commercial airliner, monitoring and good records are often ignored, or taken too casually. Here we provide guidelines, sources of information, and forms to assist in monitoring. One might be tempted to point out that nature flies without a pilot, that ecosystems lack gauges and operate without a set of instructions. Indeed, if your management plan calls for hands off, and you are willing to let natural processes go where they will, monitoring and records are unnecessary, but don’t confuse that with ecological restoration. You would never fly a plane that way (at least not for long), nor should you attempt to restore or manage an ecosystem with such a laissez faire attitude. By engaging in active manage-
ment, whether in the practice of forestry, fisheries, agriculture, or restoration, you are manipulating ecosystems, often profoundly. Monitoring is necessary to ensure that you are doing so in a sustainable and positive way. Monitoring is ideally designed to be a data collection process that provides specific response information, commonly compared to pretreatment baseline conditions, but even qualitative monitoring can provide much useful information, as we will discuss.
Task 20. Develop Your Monitoring Program Monitoring should be carefully planned. It is most useful when conducted systematically over two or more years, ideally over the length of the restoration project. Keep in mind that as ecosystems respond during restoration, the kind and frequency of monitoring will change, nearly always becoming less intensive. Do not, however, initiate more than you can sustain. It is better to have long-term consistent data of a few important parameters than inconsistent or short-term data for many. To be useful, observations and data must be religiously recorded, with dates and
S.I. Apfelbaum and A. Haney, The Restoring Ecological Health to Your Land Workbook, The Science and Practice of Ecological Restoration, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-049-1_6, © 2012 Steven I. Apfelbaum and Alan Haney
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the restoring ecological health to your land workbook
locations. What may seem trivial might provide insight over time and lead to a more successful restoration. To develop a monitoring program: 1. Review the guiding principles (task 19) to refresh your memory of what you hope to achieve with your restoration. 2. Consider one management unit at a time and review the goals and objectives you have for that unit (step 4). 3. For each goal and objectiv
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