Environment and Resource Management

Developing your monitoring plan

Monitoring overview

A monitoring plan should outline the why, what, when, who and how of your monitoring activities. A land manager’s monitoring plan may also help you determine how monitoring fits in with your other property management tasks. When developing your monitoring plan you should consider the resources that you have available for monitoring. These resources may include budget, equipment, time and/or skills. Answering the following questions will help you plan your monitoring program.

1. What are your monitoring objectives?

A critical step in developing your monitoring plan is deciding what you want to gain from your monitoring. Monitoring can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of your current management activities, to facilitate early detection of potential or emerging problems, to record changes in condition over time or to plan ongoing management activities. Your monitoring objectives should guide the development of the rest of your plan. Your monitoring objectives should also be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely.

2. How will your data be used?

How you intend to use your data determines both the required data quality and monitoring methods. You should consider who will be using your data, how they will be using it and for what reasons it will be used. If you are collecting data only for your own land management decision-making, then you can choose the level of data quality and reliability that best meets your needs. This guide provides one or more levels of monitoring for each indicator. These levels of monitoring differ in the methods that are used and not the study design (e.g. how often and where you monitor). Level 1 monitoring is the minimum level recommended for collecting information for your own decision-making, while level 2 monitoring is recommended if you wish to share your data with others. For example, Native vegetation area describes using aerial photographs or satellite images with hand-drawn overlays and field ground truthing using tape measure, compass and vehicle trip meters for level 1 monitoring (for your use only). Level 2 monitoring (data to be shared) for this indicator uses Geographical Information Systems with electronic satellite, aerial photograph or other layers and ground truthing and recording change in vegetation area with a Global Positioning System (GPS). It is important to note that level 2 monitoring will only provide better quality data for the monitoring site at the time of measurement. It does not improve how well the monitoring site represents the entire area of interest nor does it improve the number of data records over time. How representative your monitoring locations are relies on your choice of monitoring sites, how variable your property is and how many sites you monitor (see ‘4.Where will you monitor?’). The number of data records you have for a site over time is dictated by how frequently you monitor (see '5.When and how often will you monitor?’). 

Sharing your information

If you want to share your information with your industry group, a regional natural resource management body or some other organisation, then they may require data collected according to a particular standard. For example, your local Landcare group or catchment association may be participating in a regional water quality monitoring program and will welcome your data as long as it is collected to the standards they have adopted. You should contact the organisation you may be sharing your data with to check what their requirements are. The level 2 procedures for each indicator have been developed where possible and appropriate to be consistent with relevant minimum contemporary standards. This development has been supported by Indicator Reference Groups for each indicator, who contributed current information and reviewed and endorsed the procedures (see Further development and evaluation of the guide).

Standards for property level monitoring

There are no set standards that apply to monitoring at the property level because there is not one governing organisation that promotes, trains and coordinates monitoring for land managers.

Many standards for the collection of environmental natural resource management data have been established by state, national and international organisations across industries, science disciplines and levels of governments. The standard used depends on the affiliation of the organisation collecting the data and the level of data quality required. The quality level of the data is ultimately dependent upon who will use the data (yourself and/or others) and how it will be used. For example the Australian and New Zealand Guidelines for Fresh and Marine Water Quality determined by the Australian and New Zealand Environment and Conservation Council and Agriculture and Resource Management Council of Australia and New Zealand set national standards for collecting water quality data that is used by local government in the monitoring of potable water supplies.

Limitations of your data

Selecting monitoring sites usually requires choosing a small part of a larger area of land. This sampling of the larger area, as with all sampling, involves the risk of missing information present in the larger area. If an observation is made at a monitoring site on a particular occasion you can not be certain that the same is true for the rest of the land area. This is a sampling error that must be accepted. The only way of overcoming such sampling error is to monitor the whole area, which is impractical in most situations. Sampling error can be reduced by carefully selecting enough sites to represent the vegetation types and management regimes on your property. Generally the more monitoring sites you have the more reliable the gathered data is.

3. What will you monitor?

What you choose to monitor must reflect the objectives of your monitoring plan. There are many ways of identifying what to monitor on your property. You may wish to adopt all or part of the approach taken by existing initiatives, programs and/or policies. Exploring what monitoring is already occurring in your area will not only make sharing your information easier (if you wish to do so) but will also help you become more familiar with monitoring issues that are specific to your area and monitoring techniques that have been successfully applied in your area. The following information describes some of the key industry, regional, state and national initiatives, programs and policies that relate to property level monitoring.

Using the Land Manager's Monitoring Guide

If you have a good idea of what you want to monitor you can browse the indicator section of this guide. Otherwise you can use the guide’s decision support tool. This tool shows the connection between the key enterprises or production systems, land practices, management activities, potential environmental impacts, and suggested indicators (see How to use this guide). Developing a simple land manager's monitoring plan may also help to choose and prioritise what you want to monitor.

Property planning

You may have identified some key goals or objectives that you want to achieve as part of personal, family or professional management planning that involve being able to monitor the environmental impact of your activities. These goals or objectives may have been generated through a formal property management planning process provided by your industry group, your regional natural resource management body, or a local on-ground group or catchment management association.

Property level management systems

There are also a number of property level management systems that enable a systematic approach to managing for environmental impacts of land use. These include:

An overview of property level management systems is available from the Coastal CRC.

Regional natural resource management

A network of regional natural resource management bodies (and their equivalents) has been established across Australia. These bodies are responsible for preparing regional natural resource management plans. The plans must contain targets for managing the condition of natural resources and arrangements for monitoring and evaluating progress towards these targets. As a land manager in your region you may be able to participate in the projects, programs, incentive schemes and monitoring programs of the regional natural resource management bodies.

Business reporting and marketing

There are a number of international and national initiatives that provide opportunities to market your improved environmental performance. These include: ecolabelling such as the Environmental Choice Label, organic farming, EcoRange, market-orientated environmental certification for rangeland pastoral industries and the global EUREPGAP.

Government policy and incentives

4. Where will you monitor?

The objectives of your monitoring plan should be the key factor that determines where you will monitor. You will need to define the geographic boundaries for your monitoring, for example:

Careful consideration of the monitoring scale will help to avoid any misleading bias in the data and information you collect. For some issues you may need to identify which parts of your property are most at risk to a particular problem, for example changes in the pH of your soil will only be an issue in certain soil types. Some of the indicators in this guide require a property-wide approach while others require you to select a representative sample or transect of the property. 

When choosing specific monitoring sites the following points should be considered:

5. When and how often will you monitor?

How often monitoring will be carried out depends on the indicator/s you choose and the objectives of your monitoring plan. Monitoring for gradual processes such as watertable rising or bushland decline will be less frequent (intervals of two to three years or longer) than monitoring for more rapid processes (e.g. the spread of some pest animals or plants). It can also be informative to monitor when key events such as fire, drought or floods occur. For example, the early stages of soil erosion can be most easily recognised after periods of heavy rain. Alternatively, monitoring could be tied to the seasonal changes in the abundance of vegetation and native and pest animals. For example, the best time to monitor pastures is at the end of the growing season. A suggested monitoring frequency is provided for each indicator in this guide. For some indicators many years of monitoring may be needed before a clear trend can be reliably established. It should always be remembered that if a problem develops slowly (e.g. the development of salinity problems), correction will also be slow.

6. Who will be involved and how?

You should think about who will be involved with your monitoring. Will it be only yourself or will there be a team approach involving staff or family members? Will you hire a specialist in the relevant field? Involving more people may make the task easier, but it will be essential that you all have a common understanding of how you will measure and assess the things you choose to monitor. If you don’t, the value of the data could be weakened by differences in how the people measure and record the data.

Aptitude for monitoring

Conducting regular, accurate monitoring does not suit everyone. Ideally, the person responsible for monitoring should like and feel comfortable doing this kind of work. So, deciding who should be responsible for carrying out the monitoring is an important decision. People with the following personal characteristics and abilities may be the most suitable:

7. How will your data be managed?

Spending a little time thinking about how you will manage the data and information you collect about your property is important because your records grow and develop over the years. You (and anyone you work with) will find it easier and quicker to find the right information with less chance of error if your data is well organised. If you intend to share your data with others, some simple steps at the start will make your data more useful to them or acceptable to the data collection standards they may have in place. You need to decide if your records will be hard copy or digital, how you will maintain consistency in your record keeping and how your records will be accessed in the future.

Filing structure for records

Whether you use paper-based files or electronic records, the structure should be clear. It is best to be consistent with generally accepted computer file naming conventions and a logical directory structure. 

Using an organised storage (filing structure) simplifies the classification of your information. It makes it easier to file, sort and retrieve information, saving time and increasing efficiency. It also makes it easier for anyone involved in your business to access, use and contribute data to the records.

You should adopt a consistent file structure for the way you lump together your information. You may want to group things, projects or activities that are common such as: crops, fencing, sales, biodiversity, climate, water, vegetation, imagery, infrastructure, soils, etc. Or you may want to adopt a location or geographically-based structure such as: my farm, top paddock, yards, creek flats, creek, roadways etc. Whichever system you adopt, document your approach in a file directory, so it is easier for you and others who may access your filing system to add, amend and manage the data.

Data naming conventions

The naming system you use for your files and datasheets should ideally have meaning to anyone with minimal explanation. This is particularly important for computer-based storage: for example, an electronic field recording sheet of monitoring depth to groundwater on a river flat paddock at a farm near Dalby from 2003–2008 could have a file name and path as follows: dalby_myfarm_flats_waterdepth_fielddata_2003-2008.xls. 

Data storage

As with all your business records, consider the consequences of losing the data and any handwritten or printed records that you have collected over the years. You should consider whether you should make and store copies of key or summary data in a separate location from your primary storage place. For electronic records always regularly backup and/or separately store copies of your electronic files. Do not rely on the records you keep on a hard drive on your personal computer. Hard drives can and do fail.

Keeping summary records and metadata

As the amount of available information grows it is helpful to keep a summary record of your key sets of data. This is particularly valuable if you plan to share your information with others or expect that you may need to pass your records onto someone else in the future for reasons such as family succession or property sale.

Metadata is data that describes data or is "data about data". It describes the: who, what, when, where, why, and how about a data set. Metadata is critical to preserving the usefulness of data over time, for example metadata captures important information on how data was collected and/or processed so that future users of that data understand these details.

Metadata includes:

It can be a text document with some key elements or you can use the worksheet provided with each indicator monitoring tool (see Metadata example ). These key elements are:

Copyright, intellectual property, disclaimer and privacy

Taking the steps of developing a copyright notice will help ensure that you retain some control of the use of your data and information should you decide to pass it on to others.

A copyright notice or intellectual property statement should include conditions of use, conditions of access, who is granted permission to use the data and for what purpose and for what period. You may want to use the example notice provided in the guide as template for your own datasets.

This document can also be used to state the privacy conditions that you expect to be maintained if the data is to be provided to a third party. You can, for example, provide the full data set that identifies your property, your contact details and the data you have collected to your natural resource management regional body and you can also nominate which fields they have and do not have permission to pass on to someone else such as State or Australian government agencies and for what purpose the data can be used.

Acknowledgement

The information in this section has been amended from but based upon information derived from:

Last updated: 24 June 2008

Monitoring overview

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