Southwestern Australia’s forests - home to unique and highly endemic biodiversity – are increasingly vulnerable to climate change, altered fire regimes, and landscape fragmentation. In response, the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions has established a long-term Forest Health Monitoring Program (FHMP) to support adaptive management across key forest and woodland types, such as Karri, Jarrah, Tingle, and Wandoo. This presentation introduces the ecoacoustics component of the FHMP, an innovative and non-invasive monitoring program designed to assess ecological condition, and track biodiversity and ecosystem dynamics across significant spatial and temporal scales. By deploying autonomous acoustic recording units and utilising a suite of soundscape analysis techniques, it is hoped that this program will capture ecological responses to disturbance, restoration, and climate-driven shifts. A combination of soundscape metrics, acoustic indices, and machine learning tools were applied to a subset of baseline recordings collected in summer 2023 and spring 2024 to provide preliminary insights into the acoustic communities of these southwestern forest ecosystems. Spatiotemporal variability in soundscape characteristics was detected between several forest and woodland types. This included measures of amplitude, impulsiveness, periodicity, and uniformity. Results from a case study on the summer soundscape of the Northern Jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) Forest demonstrated the sensitivity of ecoacoustic tools to also detect fine-scale temporal and spatial patterns in biotic activity, lending insight into the identification of priority areas for conservation and management. By integrating novel passive acoustic monitoring technologies into forest monitoring and management, this program aims to contribute meaningfully to the bold actions required for a resilient ecological future in southwestern Australia.

The NSW Biodiversity Conservation Trust (BCT) is a statutory organisation responsible for administering private land conservation agreements in NSW. Supporting landholder to protect and enhance biodiversity is the core mission of the BCT. The BCT’s Ecological Monitoring Module (EMM) has been designed to measure state and change in biodiversity values protected by BCT private land conservation agreements across NSW. Data collected is analysed to generate insights to inform outcome evaluation, reporting, site-scale adaptive management and program-scale continuous improvement.

Since 2019, the EMM has established a monitoring network with over 1,600 vegetation condition plots in private protected areas and over 500 control plots in other tenures. This monitoring effort has delivered significant insights about the value of biodiversity assets protected, as well as improvements attributable to BCT investment. These include a 30% increase in biodiversity condition, substantiated estimates of the amount of avoided biodiversity loss, and quantification of the strategic value of BCT agreements in terms of protecting threatened species' habitats, climate refugia, and carbon stocks.

These data also contribute to ongoing continuous improvement, providing landholders with information that can guide on-ground adaptive management and informing the BCT of opportunities to strategically improve program and policy settings.

The BCT will share insights of recent monitoring and research results that provide rigorous evidence of the conservation benefits that private protected areas are making to biodiversity conservation in NSW and Australia.

It is well established that climate change and other anthropogenic activities are driving ecosystem declines and collapse globally. However, the pathways in which these declines occur - and the changes they create - differ between ecosystems, regions and timeframes. Some biota are expected to benefit from these new climate and disturbance regimes and declines one ecosystem may offer opportunities for another to expand. We can assess these changes using indicators and applying ecosystem assessment frameworks, such as the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems framework. The accuracy of an ecosystem assessment is contingent on the appropriate selection of an indicator, and the representativeness of the evidence and methods in which it is assessed. Poor indicator selection or assessment can have significant consequences, such as failure to detect an ecosystem undergoing collapse and misallocation of conservation resources. In this presentation, I will (attempt) to synthesise my PhD research and answer the following questions: (1) what indicators are being in terrestrial ecosystem risk assessments? (2) what is the trajectory of change of two similar Australian alpine ecosystems? And, (3) how are alpine and shrubs in Australia (which are the defining feature of many alpine ecosystems) responding to the same drivers of decline? The findings presented in this chapter will inform land management, future ecosystem risk assessments and further our understanding and interpretation of abundance and cover-based indicators.

Monitoring is a key tool for conservation managers, allowing insight into how changing conditions and land-use changes impact species assemblages. Often, monitoring programs are set up to provide a snapshot of communities, without necessarily targeting specific species. We interrogate one such dataset, consisting of 10-years of annual camera trap surveys from a conservation reserve, managed by the Tasmanian Land Conservancy in the Central Highlands of Tasmania. The camera network was set up to look at broad trends in mammalian activity, and was monitored 5-years on either side of a major fire which affected one half of the reserve. Using this dataset, we attempt to model spatial and temporal trends in the abundance of a suite of mammalian species using the reserve, including dasyurids and marsupial herbivores, as well as invasive species like cats and fallow deer. We are able to investigate the broad effect of the fire on some of most commonly detected species, including the Tasmanian devil and invasive fallow deer. Beyond these species, the power to detect patterns related to incidence of fire is very limited, with models failing to converge. We discuss the applications and limitations of long-term surveillance monitoring data, and how conservation managers can best use them in their decision making.

With the exception of people, the dingo (Canis familiaris/C. dingo) is Australia’s largest native terrestrial predator and has significant ecological and cultural values. This species is listed as vulnerable in the state of Victoria and there are concerns that the isolated population of Wilkerr (dingoes) in northwestern Victoria may be fewer than 100 individuals, genetically isolated, and suffering high rates of inbreeding depression. Effective policy regarding dingoes and their conservation requires robust assessment of their distribution, population size, and demographics. Lethal control of dingo populations may disturb pack social structures, affecting social learning, including hunting, and disrupt the functional role of dingoes in the Australian landscape.

We collected approximately 800,000 photos from 538 cameras over four years in the Big Desert-Wyperfeld bio-cultural landscape. Using individual Wilkerr locations we: 1) built a spatially explicit mark resight model (SMR) to estimate population size and density; and 2) Constructed a dingo social network to examine relationships between individuals.

We will discuss the environmental factors affecting dingo populations across the Big Desert-Wyperfeld bio-cultural landscape, along with the conservation and policy implications. Our framework can be adapted for similar species and ecological and conservation objectives.

The Threatened Species Index (TSX) is a vital tool for tracking and reporting on changes in the abundance of Australia’s imperilled species. Up to 2024, the Index reported on changes in the abundance of 335 species of birds, mammals, frogs and plants — derived from over 24,000 monitoring time-series — providing a crucial update on the status of these species. Nevertheless, trends for other major species groups have remained undocumented. In this presentation, we will release the results of the first attempt to compile multiple species trends for Australia’s threatened and near-threatened reptiles. Australia is a global hotspot of reptile diversity and endemism, with over 1000 species currently recognised. Of these, 95 are currently listed as threatened under Australia’s Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Act, and a further 45 listed as threatened or near threatened by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. We will present preliminary abundance trends for Australia’s threatened and near-threatened reptiles over recent decades, based on extensive monitoring data collected by the Australian Government, state and territory governments, natural resource management groups, NGOs, academics and citizen scientists. National and state-level trends will be revealed, as will a comparison between key functional groups and biomes across Australia. We will close by describing ongoing plans for filling taxonomic gaps in the TSX, including finalisation of our Threatened Frog Index and plans to develop an index for freshwater fish in 2026.