Established in 1998, the South East Queensland Fire and Biodiversity Consortium (SEQFBC) partners with 19 practitioner and stakeholder organisations to support private landholders, public land managers, utility providers and fire agencies to: (1) improve fire management and biodiversity conservation and (2) build landholder/manager capacity through engagement, training, technical expertise and research. This presentation reviews activities that support practitioner and landholder engagement and facilitate applied research, including:
(1) Capacity building services: The SEQFBC offers a suite of capacity building services and resources (e.g. workshops, training, fact sheets), the most popular being Fire Management Planning Workshops. Workshops are designed to facilitate a balance between safety, risk mitigation, property values and ecosystem health. Workshops are delivered in partnership with practitioners, including local government, Queensland Fire and Emergency Services and Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service. Between July 2017 and June 2019, the SEQFBC delivered eleven Fire Management Information Nights to over 410 people and fifteen Fire Management Planning Workshops to over 250 people, in nine Local Government areas.
(2) Facilitate research: The SEQFBC Research Student Scholarship Program supports Honours, Masters and PhD candidates to undertake applied fire ecology and management research in the SEQ Bioregion. Since 2010, the Program has distributed $18,000 to seven students from four universities, with eight papers from prominent journals, including the International Journal of Wildland Fire and the Journal of Applied Ecology.

After 20 years, whilst funding and resourcing remain a challenge, the key strength of the program is a collaborative model that embraces engagement, research and capacity building.

Ecological practitioners work in all sorts of environments and obtain massive amounts of data that mostly go unrecognized in the scientific literature. Much of the work that ecological practitioners do is inventory work, such as biodiversity surveys for environmental studies and fauna surveys and research for government, private and community organisations. These studies can fill the rather large gaps in knowledge of ecosystems and species.
Across northern Australia in the wet-dry and wet tropics, this information is often the only information available for whole regions. The lack of government and university researchers across much of the savanna region has meant that the information is invaluable. I present a case study of the Cape York and Northern Gulf regions where there are no biodiversity monitoring sites and much of the systematic inventory work has been done by ecological practitioners.

Much of the work done by ecological practitioners could provide valuable information on the status and trends of ecosystem health and species distributions and populations. This would require partnerships with Universities and Government, an environmental monitoring agency and infrastructure, and a centralized database for the storage, curation and utilization of the data. Current models are explored, such as the Atlas of Living Australia and Qld’s Wildnet.

Making decisions about fire management in Victoria is difficult because decision-makers must address complex trade-offs between life and property, and biodiversity. Currently, there are limitations in the ability to adequately and efficiently evaluate risk to ecological values, which impedes decision-making. This has led to concerns about the potential negative and unrealized impact of fire management on biodiversity values.

Our project focused on developing a decision framework to guide decision makers and stakeholders on how to better conceive and apply ecological models and metrics to inform a strategic fire planning process that transparently explores trade-offs between life and property and biodiversity values. We navigated the intrinsically complex decision context using a collaborative and participatory approach, where project partners and stakeholders were identified and engaged throughout all stages of the project. This approach was crucial in ensuring our work facilitated flexible applications of decision-making across multiple management regions. In this talk we discuss the process of developing the framework using structured decision making, including establishment of: ecological objectives, a suite of understandable performance measures, a web-based Fire Analysis Model for Ecological values (FAME) tool to analyse the ecological consequences of fire management, and an approach to analysing trade-offs. We present our key findings, lessons learnt and next steps of our participatory approach using our case study regions as examples.

For over a decade Greening Australia and University of Tasmania have collaborated via formal partnerships funded through numerous Australian Research Council Linkage Grants and more recently through involvement in an Industrial Transformation Training Centre. Throughout this ongoing relationship, University of Tasmania researchers and students have been embedded within the operations of Greening Australia. The majority of the research undertaken has applied components directly relevant to the way Greening Australia plans, implements and adapts on-ground ecological restoration works. We here outline the various collaborative research projects which has been undertaken over the past decade through the Greening Australia Tasmanian Island Ark Program. These projects (i) evaluate which plant species and provenances are best using mixed eucalypt species and provenance trials, (ii) develop integrated seed sourcing software packages to assist practitioners in their decisions for adapting to a changing climate, (iii) incorporate innovative technologies such as remote sensing and genomics to monitor the transition of restoration plantings towards a reference state, (iv) trial novel approaches to improve the success of direct seeding, (v) build a better understanding of the habitat requirements for native animals through “animal centric restoration”, and (vi) design interim habitat structures through the cross disciplinary “Species Hotels” project. These projects provide a resource for the training of the next generation of restoration scientists and practitioners, from school students to university research fellows. During this talk, we highlight the successes, challenges and lesson learned, as well as the benefits of collaborative relationships with practitioners when embedding research into on-ground works.

Bush Blocks Pty Ltd purchased a block of private land dominated by threatened native grassland, known as Temperate Native Grassland of the Victorian Volcanic Plain under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, in Cressy, Victoria in 2017. Over the next two years it was possible to create and sell native vegetation and threatened fauna offsets across most of the site. Five offset management plans were compiled by the offset buyers' ecological consultants for different sections of the site and placed on title through conservation covenants. Despite the common conditions across the site there were varying requirements between the different offset management plans around issues such as biomass management, whether by prescribed fire or sheep grazing, weed control and ecological monitoring. An overarching management plan was prepared to reconcile all of the different requirements into a comprehensive adaptive management approach for the entire site. This presentation will provide an overview of the native grassland management requirements and the process of combining different requirements into one management program for the entire site that can be implemented efficiently by ecological restoration practitioners. The development of a native seed collection business on the site that is compatible with conservation management to support local restoration projects and long term management of the site was also described in the overarching management plan and will be discussed. The difficulties of creating and implementing federal biodiversity offsets will also be discussed.

WildCount is a broad-scale, long-term monitoring program of terrestrial fauna using camera trapping technology. The program was designed to monitor change in distribution of species in national parks across the eastern seaboard of NSW, and thus address fundamental knowledge gaps: Fauna conservation status and population trends. It has been running as an annual monitoring program for eight years. The large geographic and temporal scale of WildCount presents challenges in ensuring robust design and pragmatic implementation. Relationships between researchers, on-ground staff, volunteers and the organisational hierarchy are pivotal to long-term success.
With five years of data, reliable occupancy models can be produced for ten species. Incorporation of year-on-year and covariate data will improve our ability to monitor changes for more species. In addition, records contribute to overall data available for over 140 terrestrial fauna species that is not captured in targeted wildlife surveys. Novel records are expanding understanding of what is in our reserve system. With a wealth of data, the fostering of research collaborations and communication of management-relevant findings is critical.
This talk will discuss the challenges of maintaining rigour and realising the full value of WildCount in the face of operational needs, competing on-ground priorities, and the complex nature of maintaining and promoting effective communication in a large and diverse organisation.

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of biodiversity has been heavily criticised. However, these criticisms have yet to be tested empirically across a range of geographical environments and institutions. We surveyed 243 protected area staff from 55 countries to describe how M&E is undertaken and to identify variables statistically associated with effective M&E. We found that M&E is routinely employed: 78% of respondents indicated that monitoring occurred and 64% responded that monitoring persisted for at least as long that a management action was implemented. However, our results suggested there is scope to improve the way that M&E is conducted: only 46% of respondents thought that M&E worked well, just 36% provided an example of monitoring informing management and 38% of respondents indicated that management is not undertaken in different ways to facilitate adaptive management.
Monitoring and evaluation was perceived to be working best in non-government organisations, where data are entered in existing databases, and where research and management staff work together cooperatively. Monitoring had a greater probability of informing management where documented thresholds were in place that trigger management intervention and where monitoring data were stored in a publicly available database. Management was most likely to be implemented in different ways to facilitate adaptive management in non-government organisations, where management intervention options were documented, monitoring had persisted for as long as the management action and where reporting is done regularly.
Our results indicated that a combination of institutional, design, data management and resource issues could improve M&E for biodiversity in protected areas.

Fleurieu Peninsula Swamps (FPS) are an EPBC Act listed critically endangered ecological community. The Mount Lofty Ranges Southern Emu-wren (MLRSEW) is an EPBC Act listed endangered bird that was the catalyst for the formal listing of FPS. Over 90% of FPS occur on privately owned land.

Conservation SA has run the MLRSEW/FPS Recovery Program since 1995 and through collaboration with landholders, NGOs and all forms of government have assisted with the protection of vast amounts of FPS and MLRSEW habitat.

FPS are ecological islands in a modified landscape, many regional, state or nationally threatened species are found within them and used as an incentive to encourage landholders to modify land management practices, to achieve dual conservation and productivity outcomes.

Despite the protection of large areas of habitat less than 200 MLRSEW remain. Slow declines in populations of other threatened species within FPS, post conservation intervention, pose a confounding conservation issue. Why has the protection of FPS led to declines of some threatened species? The answer may lie with the dynamic nature of FPS response to disturbance and the inadequacy of past and current conservation incentives to go beyond fencing and weed control.

Research presented on the use of fire, biomass removal and hydrological restoration will provide evidence that FPS and MLRSEWs respond favourably to strategic disturbance events.

Partnering with landholders to strategically modify habitats through active management, along with effective monitoring is necessary to ensure the long term persistence of FPS, MLRSEW and other species in the region.