Monitoring of natural resources
Why monitor?
Constraints to conventional monitoring
Locally-based monitoring
Methods
Benefits
Knowledge of changes in populations of species, habitat area or condition, and ecosystem services is often rudimentary. This presents a serious challenge for attempts to understand and reverse negative trends in natural resource values in many parts of the world.
Monitoring of natural resources can answer questions such as:
- Are there increased benefits to local
people from sustainable natural resource use?
- Are habitats and ecosystems being
degraded or improved?
- Are the populations of individual
species of plants and animals declining or increasing?
- What are the causes?
- Has management intervention the
intended impact on the ecosystem?
In other words, monitoring can answer:
- Are the management interventions in the area effective in addressing conservation of ecosystem goods and services - and sustainable development?
Professional scientist-executed natural
resource monitoring schemes often face a number of important challenges:
- Running costs are high
- The schemes are hard to sustain
- Difficult to implement
- Perceived by managers to be highly
technical or irrelevant
- Seen by some as paying inadequate
attention to other stakeholders than scientists
![](../pict/satmon.jpg)
Locally-based monitoring of natural
resources embraces a broad range of approaches, from self-monitoring of
harvests by local resource users themselves, to censuses by local government
staff, or inventories by amateur naturalists. In all of these approaches,
the monitoring is carried out at a local scale, and by individuals with no
or only limited formal science training.
![](../pict/2764932.jpg)
The field methods used in locally-based
monitoring schemes vary from scheme to scheme depending on the local
circumstances. Five broad classes of generic methods appear particularly
suitable:
- Patrol records. Filling-out routine
patrol sheets on key resources, habitats or extent of resource
exploitation
- Transects. Simple dedicated transects of
resources and human resource use
- Species lists. Presence/ absence of
resources on fixed-time lists
- Simple photography. On-the-ground
fixed point photography
- Village group discussions. Discussions
between government staff and local volunteer members of ‘community
monitoring groups’
A description of these methods are available
here and examples of schemes using
them.
The potential benefits of locally-based
monitoring of natural resources are:
- Provides relevant information for
management actions
- Can be sustained using locally
available resources
- Promotes participation of local people
in the management
- Stimulates discussion about natural
resource management amongst stakeholders
- Builds the capacity of field
government staff and communities in management skills
- Seeks to provide people with direction
regarding the aims of sustainable resource management
- Reinforces the consolidation of
existing livelihoods through strengthening community-based resource
management systems
![](../pict/graf.jpg)
This graph shows the effectiveness of
participatory and conventional scientific natural resource monitoring
methods in generating natural resource management interventions intended to
improve the way local people (black), outsiders (white), and both (gray)
manage Philippine forest and coastal resources. For the same recurrent
government investment, far more interventions resulted from participatory
monitoring methods as compared with conventional scientific ones (a). This
pattern also holds if the analysis is restricted to those interventions that
only target the three most serious threats to resources at each site (b), or
those interventions that led to policy change with a potential long-term
impact on sustainable development (i.e.,new resolutions or bylaws, c. From Ambio 36: 566-570 (2007).
![](../pict/graph22.jpg)
This graph shows the spatial and temporal
scale of decision-making from environmental monitoring, based on data from
published monitoring schemes 1989–2009 (n = 104). The circles comprise all
the scientist-executed (blue) and all the participatory monitoring schemes
(red). The bar chart indicates the number of scientist-executed monitoring
schemes (blue bars), monitoring schemes with local data collectors (white
bars) and participatory monitoring schemes (red bars) at each level of
spatial scale and implementation time. From J. Appl. Ecol. 47: 1166-1168
(2010).