A new method to collect habitat condition data from across Australia using expert elicitation
The challenge: How to measure habitat condition nation-wide?
Managing and conserving Australia's wildlife and natural heritage requires reliable on-ground measurement of habitat condition. Obtaining this data is challenging due to the vast size of the Australian continent, and surrounding islands and seas, with its incredible array of unique habitats and species. Moreover, although most agree that ecological condition reflects how well an ecosystem retains its characteristic features, there is no universal definition for ‘condition’. Even measuring the physical and biological aspects of an environment only provides a raw description of its key properties. As a result, comparing and integrating condition assessments across different locations is not a simple process.
Australia’s ecological science and management communities have a deep understanding of the history, dynamics, and condition of our diverse native habitats. This expertise is an enormously valuable resource in research and conservation endeavours. However, expert knowledge on the condition of different locations is often distributed across many disconnected sources, inaccessible, or not recorded, and it is often difficult to compare assessments across habitats or between individuals. That is why we need a consistent and reliable way to collect and preserve expert opinion on the condition of Australia’s ecosystems and to be able to compare these assessments nation-wide.
Our response: a web-based tool to gather expert knowledge on habitat condition
The Australian Government Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) is collaborating with CSIRO and the ALA to develop innovative approaches for collecting and assessing information about ecological condition across Australia.
The Habitat Condition Assessment Tool (HCAT) is a web-based platform that enables ecological experts, people with deep environmental knowledge and experience, to provide site-level habitat condition assessments for areas with which they are familiar. These assessments will contribute to a library of site condition observations from across Australia. The resulting library will be used in research, conservation planning, monitoring, and reporting.
HCAT collates expert interpretations of condition, acknowledging that reliable condition assessments are heavily dependent on their ecological knowledge, and places this expertise at the centre of the assessment system. By providing clear guidance for experts on how to contextualise and score condition, the HCAT method helps ensure a more consistent interpretation of condition values for use in different types of statistical and environmental analysis. Individual expert site condition scores are also calibrated using a separate image condition assessment process. This system ensures consistency, repeatability, and allows for comparisons between sites and experts. We are also engaging with experts covering a wide range of ecosystem types to help ensure we generate a diverse array of site assessments that represent the incredible variety of habitats found in Australia.
The sites experts provide may be small or large, depending on the area over which a homogenous condition score can be applied. For each site, experts are asked to provide a condition score between 1 and 0 (1= habitat with high ecosystem integrity as it might have existed prior to European colonisation; 0= completely transformed habitat with all native species removed), the time period of their assessment, and (optionally) the anthropogenic drivers influencing the score.
The result: expert condition assessments with national applications
Following the pilot launch of HCAT in 2018, the data provided by experts has already been included in several projects and publications. For example, one of the original purposes of developing an expert elicitation method and compiling site condition data was to generate training and validation data for the Habitat Condition Assessment System (HCAS). The HCAS combines biological and physical ecosystem data, and information about the location of remaining intact ecosystems, to estimate habitat condition across the Australian continent using satellite remote sensing. Data delivered from HCAT has been used to support HCAS models by providing examples of locations in natural areas that are in an intact state, as well as validation sites that have reduced ecological integrity due to post-industrial era anthropogenic pressures. In addition to HCAS, the data collected in the HCAT will be made publicly available for other research and monitoring purposes, such as the Ecological Knowledge System (EKS) for the Nature Repair Market.
Based on feedback from past participants, we continue to implement improvements to the HCAT. Improvements applied in the current version of the HCAT include new options for uploading site assessments, a more streamlined registration and data entry process, and updated guidance and scoring methods. Further enhancements will be identified from future participants to ensure a user-friendly experience.
Help spread the word!
If you think someone you know would like to contribute to the HCAT, please encourage them to contact the project team to get started: expertconditionassessments@csiro.au.