Designing an Inventory and Monitoring Programme for the Department of Conservation’S Natural Heritage Management System
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Designing an inventory and monitoring programme for the Department of Conservation’s Natural Heritage Management System Designing an inventory and monitoring programme for the Department of Conservation’s Natural Heritage Management System Robert B. Allen, Elaine F. Wright, Catriona J. MacLeod, Peter J. Bellingham, David M. Forsyth, Norman W.H. Mason, Andrew M. Gormley, Anna E. Marburg, Darryl I. MacKenzie and Meredith McKay Landcare Research, PO Box 69040, Lincoln 7640, New Zealand Landcare Research Contract Report: LC1730 Prepared for: Department of Conservation Planning, Monitoring and Reporting Manager Science and Capability Group Wellington DATE: December 2013 Reviewed by: Approved for release by: Terry Greene Rob Allen Bill Lee Science Team Leader Eric Spurr Ecosystem Processes Clare Veltman Bruce Warburton Disclaimer: The Department takes no responsibility for the accuracy of the report and the findings and opinions expressed therein. © Department of Conservation 2013 This report was produced by Landcare Research New Zealand Ltd for the Department of Conservation. This report was originally published in September 2009 and reissued December 2013. The Department started progressively implementing a national biodiversity monitoring and reporting system in 2011/12. Please note that the implemented system differs in some aspects from that described in the report, including associated costs. All copyright in this report is the property of the Crown and any unauthorised publication, reproduction, or adaptation of this report is a breach of that copyright and illegal. Contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... 1 1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 3 2 Review of five priority measures ....................................................................................... 6 2.1 Elements in common across three vegetation measures ................................................... 6 2.2 Vegetation measure: Distribution and abundance of exotic weeds ................................. 29 2.3 Vegetation measure: Size-class structure of canopy dominants ...................................... 44 2.4 Vegetation measure: Representation of plant functional types ....................................... 56 2.5 Distribution and abundance of exotic weeds and pests considered a threat – pests ...... 90 2.6 Assemblages of widespread animal species – birds ........................................................ 133 3 Integration among five priority measures..................................................................... 202 4 Conclusions .................................................................................................................... 204 5 Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... 205 6 References ..................................................................................................................... 206 Appendix – Supplementary tables and figure ........................................................................ 222 FINALREPORT – DECEMBER 2013 Designing an inventory and monitoring programme for the Department of Conservation’s Natural Heritage Management System Robert B. Allen1, Elaine F. Wright2, Catriona J. MacLeod1, Peter J. Bellingham1, David M. Forsyth3, Norman W.H. Mason1, Andrew M. Gormley1, Anna E. Marburg1, Darryl I. MacKenzie and Meredith McKay1 1Landcare Research, PO Box 69040, Lincoln 7640, New Zealand, [email protected] 2Department of Conservation, PO Box 13049, Christchurch 8142, New Zealand, [email protected] 2Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research, Department of Sustainability and Environment, 123 Brown Street, Heidelberg, Victoria 3084, Australia, [email protected] Abstract The Department of Conservation (DOC) is the central government organisation charged with conserving the natural and historic heritage of New Zealand on behalf of, and for the benefit of, present and future New Zealanders. This requires DOC to know where heritage outcomes are being achieved and how management interventions can be used to improve poor outcomes. Reporting on progress towards achieving outcomes is dependent on the development of indicators for each component of natural heritage within an explicit inventory and monitoring programme (IMP). Implementation of these indicators will demonstrate DOC’s leadership in quantifying the status of New Zealand’s natural heritage, provide an opportunity to engage with stakeholders from a position of strength, and more generally allow the Department to better connect with the public. An inventory and monitoring programme will provide unbiased, repeatable ecological-integrity-indicator estimates for all Conservation lands. This report presents technical details that form a basis for designing five measures to report on three natural heritage priority indicators: Size-class structure of canopy dominants; Representation of plant functional types; Distribution and abundance of exotic weeds and pests considered a threat – Weeds, Distribution and abundance of exotic weeds and pests considered a threat – Pests; and, Assemblages of widespread animal species – Birds. The spatially extensive, robustly designed programme will position New Zealand strongly, both nationally and internationally, to report on the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation. Keywords: biodiversity assessment, monitoring, performance measurement, invasive species, pest impacts, bird community structure, plant size-structure, functional traits 1 1 Introduction The Department of Conservation (DOC) is the central government organisation charged with conserving the natural and historic heritage of New Zealand on behalf of, and for the benefit of, present and future New Zealanders. This requires DOC to know where heritage outcomes are being achieved and how management interventions can be used to improve poor outcomes. The desired outcome of conserving natural heritage was recently defined as maintaining ecological integrity and this now forms the basis for implementing a Natural Heritage Management System (NHMS) (Lee et al. 2005). Reporting on progress towards achieving the outcome is dependent on the development of indicators for each component within an explicit inventory and monitoring programme (IMP). Although the selection of specific indicators remains a contentious issue, they also remain essential to society and are widely used (e.g. nitrates for water quality; blood pressure for health risks; consumer price index for inflation). Indicators within an IMP would provide a more systematic approach than is currently available to quantify ecological integrity and its threats. It is anticipated that the IMP indicators will increase the quality and transparency of DOC resource allocation to maintain ecological integrity and provide the basis for a systematic assessment of the entire New Zealand landscape. The National Monitoring and Reporting System (part of the NHMS) contains three components that are currently under development: • National Ecosystems and Species • Managed Ecosystems • Managed Threatened Species They can be distinguished by their objectives, scale over which they operate, type of measures implemented, and target end-users. Each includes indicators, measures, monitoring and reporting tools that are intended to operate at a range of scales. The three components collectively contribute to measuring ecological integrity. An important challenge will be to define and integrate the indicators from these various components. This report considers the design of indicators for National Ecosystems and Species reporting. These indicators should provide a verifiable broad-based picture of ecological integrity on Conservation lands, and its threats, for organisational (DOC), and sub- organisational (e.g. Conservancy) reporting. It is an objective way of assessing what outcomes are being achieved at large scales (e.g. is DOC land becoming more or less weedy?). These indicators applied nationally should also provide a means of improving and assessing management effectiveness by providing a context for the selection of managed places (e.g. are their pests unusually abundant nationally?) and direct contrasts with managed places (e.g. are weeds in managed places less than those in unmanaged sites?) respectively. This will require comparable data from managed-place and national monitoring. We envisage the indicators could also serve the needs of international reporting (e.g. Convention on Biological Diversity). Although there is currently no globally accepted set of indicators there is a lot of commonality in the types of data available and desired (Scholes et al. 2008). Lee et al. (2005) proposed a range of IMP indicators that can report on components of ecological integrity for the whole New Zealand landscape. Three indicators were chosen for 3 early implementation through this project to provide new and objective data with enough detail to address the concerns of DOC, stakeholders, and the New Zealand public. These indicators were selected by DOC as having high policy relevance and being suitable for reporting on components of ecological integrity (Table 1). For example, Coomes et al. (2003) showed New Zealand’s indigenous forests were widely deficient in small trees and that