CHAPTER 6 • Coastal Environmental Management in Southeast Australia: The Roles of Ecology
119
This is almost inevitably doomed, given the large amount of existing, published
ecological work that demonstrates the small-scale nature of processes causing variation and change in coastal assemblages in southeast Australia (e.g. soft -sediments,
Morrisey et al. 1992a,b; mangrove forests, Chapman and Underwood 1997a; rocky
shores, Underwood 1994b, 1996a; Underwood and Chapman 1996; Underwood et al.
1983; kelp-beds, Kennelly and Underwood 1992).
Obviously, managers and policy-makers cannot have processes and instruments that
match exactly the bewildering array of small-scale ecological complexity. Nevertheless, they have a responsibility for their actions and decisions. They should therefore
take some interest in determining the consequences for long-term environmental welfare of managing by regions, catchments, council boundaries. Instead, they are simply
dismissive of any process that could investigate the relationships and likely outcomes
of mismatches between scales of ecological patterns and processes and scales of managerial decisions. The current Federal Minister for the Environment's decision-making
creates desperate and urgent needs for research to help him be efficient and cost-effective (which are goals of many modern governments).
A further issue is that there are widespread attempts by government agencies and
community groups to be involved in "monitoring" and "assessment" of coastal
biodiversity. This involves decisions to spend considerable sums of money (DEST 1997).
Unfortunately, no current methods are available to document biodiversity of complex
assemblages in complex habitats where there is considerable spatial and temporal variation. Efforts to provide such methods (Legendre and Anderson 1998; Underwood and
Chapman 1998) require urgent validation at the scales needed for managers. They also
require urgent simplification to ensure their reliability for community groups. At the
same time, Australia has suffered the world-wide downturn in funding for taxonomy
and systematics (Ladiges 1992). Consequently, on both accounts, the inevitable outcome
of large-scale spending on pseudo-documentation of patterns of biodiversity by amateur groups must be waste, lost opportunities and very limited environmental understanding and protection. In the absence of professional science, external review of
projects by experts, demonstration of quality control and consistent reliability and
integrity of any data, there are no possible positive alternatives.
A second issue conc~rns the whole notion of "monitoring". Environmental science
moved a long way to rid itself of the shackles of routine, hypothesis-free data gathering. Monitoring environmental variables, be they physical (e.g. turbidity or sedimentload in -estuarine water), chemical (dissolved oxygen) or biological (concentration of
phytoplankton or local richness of species) is largely a pointless exercise. Very occasionally, such as with loss of raptorial birds because of bio-accumulation of DDT, routine observations and monitoring lead to the discovery of a problem (Hickey and
Anderson 1968). This is, however, rare relative to the costs (Underwood 1989).
Monitoring to detect change actually requires explicit statements about the nature
of change, the processes causing it, the anticipated magnitudes and directions of change
and their time-courses. Then and only theri can an appropriate framework of sampling
and measurement be designed. It must have the relevant spatial scales, frequency and
duration of timing (Underwood 1991) and intensity of measurement to detect the proposed changes (Green 1979).
Stopping the waste of unplanned, hypothesis-free monitoring and directing effort
into properly planned campaigns of sampling to get information needed to inform
119
This is almost inevitably doomed, given the large amount of existing, published
ecological work that demonstrates the small-scale nature of processes causing variation and change in coastal assemblages in southeast Australia (e.g. soft -sediments,
Morrisey et al. 1992a,b; mangrove forests, Chapman and Underwood 1997a; rocky
shores, Underwood 1994b, 1996a; Underwood and Chapman 1996; Underwood et al.
1983; kelp-beds, Kennelly and Underwood 1992).
Obviously, managers and policy-makers cannot have processes and instruments that
match exactly the bewildering array of small-scale ecological complexity. Nevertheless, they have a responsibility for their actions and decisions. They should therefore
take some interest in determining the consequences for long-term environmental welfare of managing by regions, catchments, council boundaries. Instead, they are simply
dismissive of any process that could investigate the relationships and likely outcomes
of mismatches between scales of ecological patterns and processes and scales of managerial decisions. The current Federal Minister for the Environment's decision-making
creates desperate and urgent needs for research to help him be efficient and cost-effective (which are goals of many modern governments).
A further issue is that there are widespread attempts by government agencies and
community groups to be involved in "monitoring" and "assessment" of coastal
biodiversity. This involves decisions to spend considerable sums of money (DEST 1997).
Unfortunately, no current methods are available to document biodiversity of complex
assemblages in complex habitats where there is considerable spatial and temporal variation. Efforts to provide such methods (Legendre and Anderson 1998; Underwood and
Chapman 1998) require urgent validation at the scales needed for managers. They also
require urgent simplification to ensure their reliability for community groups. At the
same time, Australia has suffered the world-wide downturn in funding for taxonomy
and systematics (Ladiges 1992). Consequently, on both accounts, the inevitable outcome
of large-scale spending on pseudo-documentation of patterns of biodiversity by amateur groups must be waste, lost opportunities and very limited environmental understanding and protection. In the absence of professional science, external review of
projects by experts, demonstration of quality control and consistent reliability and
integrity of any data, there are no possible positive alternatives.
A second issue conc~rns the whole notion of "monitoring". Environmental science
moved a long way to rid itself of the shackles of routine, hypothesis-free data gathering. Monitoring environmental variables, be they physical (e.g. turbidity or sedimentload in -estuarine water), chemical (dissolved oxygen) or biological (concentration of
phytoplankton or local richness of species) is largely a pointless exercise. Very occasionally, such as with loss of raptorial birds because of bio-accumulation of DDT, routine observations and monitoring lead to the discovery of a problem (Hickey and
Anderson 1968). This is, however, rare relative to the costs (Underwood 1989).
Monitoring to detect change actually requires explicit statements about the nature
of change, the processes causing it, the anticipated magnitudes and directions of change
and their time-courses. Then and only theri can an appropriate framework of sampling
and measurement be designed. It must have the relevant spatial scales, frequency and
duration of timing (Underwood 1991) and intensity of measurement to detect the proposed changes (Green 1979).
Stopping the waste of unplanned, hypothesis-free monitoring and directing effort
into properly planned campaigns of sampling to get information needed to inform