Community-Friendly Methods for Monitoring Riverside Rehabilitation: A Case Study

Local community groups in their management of rehabilitation projects are often motivated by the goal of creating ecosystems that provide improved habitats for native species. It is important that community groups have the ability to monitor progress towards such a goal, to ensure their hard work and time has not been wasted. Indeed, government funding bodies now require the objectives of rehabilitation projects to be measured in terms of outcomes and reported as such. Terrestrial invertebrates have been recommended as bioindicators because of their abundance, importance in ecosystem function and their sensitivity to environmental change. However, monitoring invertebrates is often not feasible by community groups because of the high costs of both laboratory sorting and storage of specimens. Monitoring invertebrates also requires access to both specialist equipment and taxonomic expertise. Here we present the results of a project to develop indices that: (i) are cost-effective; (ii) limit and/or eliminate laboratory processing and the need for expert help; (iii) can be derived by community groups; (iv) based on processes that invertebrates are responsible for; and (v) are indicative of, and related to, successive stages of riparian rehabilitation. Several simple methods such as scoring insect leaf damage, measuring rates of seed removal by ants and assessing the diversity of web-building spiders (using features of their webs) were developed. These methods and indices were then compared to invertebrate taxa richness and abundance at the same sites estimated from traditional invertebrate sampling techniques such as yellow-pan and pit-fall traps. A set of the simpler methods were subsequently trialled at community attended workshops where we examine observer accuracy, precision and method 'useability'. Quantitative and semi-qualitative collected data from these workshops were used to further refine methods and a number of important outcomes were gained through post-workshop evaluations.