The RCAAE welcomes this inquiry into Australia’s faunal extinction crisis and has made a submission highlighting the need to invest in long-term monitoring to track the status of threatened species populations. Such an investment is needed to inform appropriate management and ensure the persistence of Australia’s threatened species, such as the Burramys (mountain pygmy possum) and Guthega Skink.

Monitoring, performed over long time periods, is necessary to detect changes in population abundance, identify key threats and causes of decline, and to undertake effective adaptive management to reverse species decline. Almost nowhere else is this better illustrated than in the Australian Alps where long-term monitoring and management of threatened species has been undertaken for decades.

Chronic under-funding threatens the capacity to continue monitoring threatened species and undertake required management actions. A new Federal funding initiative is urgently needed in Australia to ensure that current long-term monitoring for threatened species is maintained, and to enable such monitoring activities to be expanded.

The full RCAAE submission can be found here.
All submissions made to the parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s faunal extinction crisis are accessible here.

The nationally endangered Mountain pygmy possum (Burramys parvus).