Checking the health of our habitat: project update
Posted on 16 April, 2020 by Ivan
In 2009, Connecting Country created a Biodiversity Blueprint with the help of the community and our partners. From the outset, scientific monitoring has been a high priority at Connecting Country. Monitoring allows us to observe changes in biodiversity over time, which gives us valuable information for ecological decision-making.
One of our monitoring priorities is the Brush-tailed Phascogale (photo by Jess Lawton)
We’ve been fortunate to have a world-class landscape ecologist, Professor Andrew Bennett, assist in creating our monitoring programs for woodland birds and the brush-tailed phascogale.
After the success of our ‘Stewards for Woodland Birds’ project, in 2018 we were delighted to announce we obtained funding from the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust to support the review and transition of our monitoring programs. Habitat ‘Health Check: empowering citizen scientists to monitor habitat health in Central Victoria’ has been the project we required to transition to a citizen science model, with volunteers managed and supported by a paid Monitoring Coordinator.
Project achievements
After two years, Habitat Health Check is nearing completion. Our aim was to create a collaborative, robust, citizen science project that monitors native animals and plants in the Mount Alexander region. The project involved reviewing our four existing long-term monitoring programs: birds, nest boxes, plants, and frogs and reptiles. We then developed a new community-driven model that empowers our enthusiastic and skilled volunteers, maintains scientific rigor, and promotes online data sharing. We’re now sharing our valuable data with the community via the Visualising Victoria’s Biodiversity online portal and the Victorian Biodiversity Atlas.
During Habitat Health Check, our hardworking volunteers collected 2,280 new bird records, bringing our total bird records to over 26,000 individual bird records, and 541 records for our nest box monitoring. This is an amazing effort from our volunteers and a huge achievement for our Monitoring Coordinator. After reviewing our existing monitoring programs and running a series of community workshops, we have focused our resources and volunteer base, ensuring we have a sustainable monitoring program for the future.
Connecting Country’s Monitoring Coordinator, Jess Lawton, said: ‘We have held many workshops and meetings over the past two years to review and refine our monitoring program to ensure we make the best use of community resources, and that our work is congruent with both Connecting Country’s goals and areas of interest in the community. We value our volunteers and have included them in every stage of the development of our monitoring programs. I believe we now have a stronger and more focused program, after careful consideration of feedback from the community, volunteers and other stakeholders’.
Latest monitoring reports
Here are the most recent reports on our nest box and woodland bird monitoring:
It is a joy to get out and monitor birds such as the lovely Spotted Pardalote (photo by Patrick Kavanagh)
Still time to get involved
We are still open to more volunteers for our bird and nest box monitoring programs, if you are keen to be involved in our ongoing monitoring for ecological change. Bird monitoring is conducted each winter and spring, and nest box monitoring is conducted in autumn. We’re closely monitoring the COVID-19 restrictions and will adjust our activities as required to keep everyone safe. For more details, please contact our monitoring coordinator Jess Lawton (jess@connectingcountry.org.au).
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