The Challenges and Opportunities that Lie Ahead

In Conclusion

The approach recommended in this book makes full use of our existing knowledge to increase the efficiency of a monitoring project. It is difficult to see how we could collect less information without compromising the monitoring result. Some might argue that we are already collecting less information than we should, but that is open to debate.

For the purposes of conservation management, we simply need to know whether our management is achieving its aims. This is not a statistical question. Farmers and foresters do not use complex statistics to assess whether the harvest has met their expectations; they simply weigh it. This book has focused on describing, and illustrating, a similarly reliable and efficient approach to monitoring nature conservation.