Terrestrial Fauna Monitoring
Many development approvals require the implementation of fauna monitoring programmes, but these often lack the rigour to be of use to either proponents or regulators. Biota has expertise in the design and implementation of high quality fauna monitoring programmes that deliver meaningful data to guide management operational responses.
We are familiar with the latest monitoring technology, sampling methods and analysis, including SECR, distance sampling and other robust analytical approaches to monitoring species density over time and analysing the influence of environmental variables.
Subterranean Fauna Monitoring
Sampling for stygofauna and troglofauna is inherently challenging when seeking to document the full range of species present in a given area. This context make ongoing monitoring - when factors such as changes in rainfall can add further variation to results - even more complex.
Biota has successfully designed and implemented long term monitoring programs for both stygofauna and troglofauna, including consideration of environmental and habitat covariates to inform interpretations of changes in faunal community composition and species distributions over time. This is essential to enable project-related impacts to be discriminated from normal environmental variation in subterranean ecosystems.
Mangrove Monitoring
Mangrove ecosystems are a significant ecological community type along the northern coasts of Australia, and coastal developments often have requirements to monitor mangroves for direct or indirect impacts.
Biota has been designing and implementing mangrove ecological monitoring for more than 20 years, including the collection of key community data on recruitment and survivorship and placing this into context with analogue reference sites. We combined the application of remote sensing and GIS analysis to place quantitative ecological data collected in the field into broader context within monitored tidal creek systems.
Vegetation Monitoring
Many different types of developments result in requirements to monitor native vegetation. This can range from monitoring riverine vegetation in areas where mine dewatering or other discharge occurs, monitoring for the impacts of dust or other particulate deposition, through to rehabilitation success and levels of weed invasion either during or after operations.
Biota has both designed and established new vegetation monitoring programs, and continued the implementation of existing programs; including the review and improvement of monitoring designs and the auditing, rationalisation and analysis of historical vegetation data.