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(Dr. David Yeates) All the evidence we've gathered to date
when we monitor Australia's biodiversity indicates that...
indicate that the pressures on biodiversity continue to
increase, and our biodiversity continues to decline.
That's why it's critically important that we use science
and scientific monitoring in order to better manage
to Australian's biodiversity into the future.
There's a lack of data on the status and trend of Australian
biodiversity in general, but Australia's not unique
in that sense in that many countries would like to have more
data on the status of their biodiversity and its change.
One of the challenges we always face is that we didn't
really collect accurate data at the beginning of
the change process, and we don't have good accurate
estimates of how many species are in Australia.
We believe there are something like 500 or 600,000
species of animals and plants and microorganisms in Australia.
Probably only about 25% of those have formally been named
by scientists. We're aware of many, many more,
but they just haven't received the attention they deserved
in terms of scientific naming yet, and there any many,
many other ones out there that we believe exist,
but we don't have accurate records for so far.
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It's definitely the case that monitoring Australia's
biodiversity has become much more important in the last
five or ten years. Scientists in Australia studying
our biodiversity realise that we need much more accurate
information through robust and well designed monitoring programs.
One of the important ways that Australia is addressing the knowledge
gap in biodiversity monitoring is through the Atlas of Living Australia,
which is delivering digital information from the plant and animal
collections in Australia on the distribution and abundance
of Australia's animals and plants. So that's a great initiative
that allows for members of the public and scientists to go
and view places where plants and animals in
Australia occur, or did once occur.
So that allows managers greater understanding of the
geographic distribution of Australia's biodiversity,
a much greater access than ever been available before.
Large scale monitoring programs for Australia's
biodiversity have begun in the last few years,
especially with the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network,
which aims to provide on ground and satellite
indirect monitoring of Australia's biodiversity in
a number of key biomes throughout the continent, so that's a really exciting
investment by the Australian government
in monitoring Australia's biodiversity.
The National Flying Fox Monitoring Program is a good example of a single
species monitoring program that gives you an understanding of the complexity
and expense of monitoring a widespread species like that properly.
So on a particular day each year over 500 different flying fox camps,
from Cooktown right down through the east Australian coast,
are monitored and individual flying foxes are counted
in each of those camps. So that's a tremendous
effort from a lot of scientists and volunteers,
and that needs to be done over many, many years to understand
the trend in the diversity and abundance of those flying foxes.
And the National Biological Collections and the other
collections in Australia are critical resources
for research on Australia's biodiversity.
They allow us to compare new species that we might discover through
monitoring and survey work, with species that are already known to
exist here and have names. And they also allow us
to assess the abundance of species through time.
And in some cases they allow us to look back in
time at genetic diversity. So there are a couple of good cases
now of researchers being able to assess past genetic diversity
by examining specimens that are in Australia's Biological Collection.
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It's certain that in the future the monitoring of
Australia's biodiversity with incorporate many more genetic
and genomic techniques into the armoury of tools.
Genetic techniques enable us to gather a lot of
information very quickly now on the diversity of
Australia's plants and animals, and this provides us now
with a wonderful and very powerful tool for
assessing and monitoring Australia's biodiversity in the future.
Australia is one of the world's mega diverse biodiversity
countries, and it... and has a very high level of biodiversity,
particularly endemic biodiversity that's only found here.
We're lucky that we have a well developed infrastructure
for science and natural resource planning.
We're very well placed to use information from
the collections through the Atlas of Living Australia,
new genetic technologies, and really sophisticated
new monitoring programs to adequately assess, monitor,
and ultimately manage Australia's biodiversity much
better into the future for future generations.
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