Ben Sparrow, Greg Guerin, Andrew Lowe

The need for a national ecosystem monitoring system for the Australian rangelands has been regularly identified. Against a background of natural variability, rangeland ecosystems face both short and longer-term impacts. These pressures, including overstocking, climate change, deforestation, altered fire regimes and invasion by feral species, are expected to drive changes to the structure, function and composition of native vegetation, and significantly impact fauna populations and ecosystem fluxes. A national monitoring framework is required to report where and when change is occurring, what is changing and the direction and magnitude of change, all of which underpin understanding the causes and viable management interventions required to mitigate undesirable outcomes.
In this paper we articulate criteria for a national monitoring system that provide the essential information to assess environmental change and detail how such a system will enable change to be assessed at local to global scales. The system should incorporate a range of scales of monitoring, detect changes in ecosystem structure, function and diversity and measure key environmental variables. It should encourage the standardisation of data collection, the collection of environmental samples for downstream analysis and the integration of new technologies to improve data collection, analysis and delivery. Our vision includes the provision of free, widely accessible data and the publication of methods, data and rationale in peer reviewed literature. The framework also needs to meet a variety of State, Territory and national legislative and international reporting requirements. Finally, the framework will be built on, and incorporate the best of existing monitoring programs and will be supported long-term as part of the national science infrastructure.
Whilst these system design elements appear difficult to achieve, there are many reasons to be optimistic that this vision can become a reality.