From rear-view monitoring to early warning and proactive management

Monitoring programs provide a rear view of the status and trends of ecosystems, species and populations. What most ecological monitoring programs don’t do well, however, is to provide a windscreen view of the immediate... [ view full abstract ]

Monitoring programs provide a rear view of the status and trends of ecosystems, species and populations. What most ecological monitoring programs don’t do well, however, is to provide a windscreen view of the immediate horizon - the early warning function. For ecosystems under pressure from local, regional and global factors, the early warning function will become an increasingly important tool for proactive environmental management. In this talk I present the case that monitoring programs need stronger integration with environmental and ecological modelling to inform proactive management. Further, I show that monitoring and modelling need to be integrated with strategic process studies to discern complex causal linkages between pressures and ecosystem responses, and to reduce uncertainty around risk assessments. I use the Great Barrier Reef as a case study. Specifically, I illustrate by examples how the integration of monitoring, modelling and management within a drivers/pressures/state/impact/response (DPSIR) framework via smart indicators can better support adaptive management compared to the business as usual. Using a combination of qualitative and spatial numeric models, I show how monitoring of key indicators (environmental, ecological and biological) in combination with modelling and scenario exploration can enable monitoring programs to become a more operational tool for proactive marine risk assessments and management planning.