Monitoring to Learn, Learning to Monitor: A Critical Analysis of Opportunities for Indigenous Community-Based Monitoring of Environmental Change in Australian Rangelands

1. What they did

Monitoring by Indigenous communities has helped many countries track environmental change and adapt to it, but it is little used in Australia’s remote, semi-arid rangelands. The authors looked at why, and at what could be done, in the Alinytjara Wilurara Natural Resources Management (AW NRM) region of north-west South Australia. About 3000 people live there, mostly Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjaara people who call themselves Anangu (“people”).

• Reviewing other programmes. They compared seven successful Indigenous community-based monitoring programmes from Canada, New Zealand and northern Australia by what knowledge and technology they used, who gathered and used the data, and who benefited.
• Building a framework. They placed these programmes on two axes: traditional versus scientific knowledge, and local community versus outside parties as the main beneficiary.
• Interviewing stakeholders (2013). At the request of the Indigenous AW NRM Board, they interviewed 14 people: AW NRM staff, elected Anangu Board members and South Australian Government staff.
• Community workshops (2014). They drew on workshops in Anangu communities at Yalata, Kanpi-Nyapari, Kenmore Park, Ernabella and Umuwa.
• Placing local programmes. They placed the region’s four main monitoring programmes (biodiversity, camels, Buffel grass and coastal) on the same framework.

2. What they found

Monitoring in the region

• Biodiversity: animals are monitored by tagging, pit traps, recording animal tracks, and recording sightings with CyberTracker software and Global Positioning System (GPS). Anangu help identify and record tracks and monitor culturally important species such as the Mallee Fowl, Black-footed Rock-wallaby and Sandhill Dunnart. Most programmes repeat observations only a few times a year or less. These programmes are popular with Anangu: they get people out on country, give some paid work and a sense of pride.
• Camels: browsing impacts, aerial surveys and satellite collars. Anangu do survey and mustering work. Many local people want a sustainable camel harvest for income, which conflicts with the management goal of reducing camel numbers.
• Buffel grass: mapping the spread of this invasive grass after rain, with GPS and CyberTracker. Anangu in Oak Valley and Yalata are contracted for some of this work.
• Coastal: marine debris, whales, shorebirds, mulloway tagging, fishing surveys and marine mammals. All involve Anangu in some way. A new digital storytelling project uses tablets to record community views.

How the programmes compare

Successful programmes elsewhere use traditional knowledge fully, either on its own or alongside science. In contrast, the AW programmes mostly put scientific knowledge first and produce it mainly for outside institutions, including the NRM Board itself. Biodiversity monitoring and the Dreamweaver rockhole program for women are partial exceptions.

Challenges raised in interviews

• No baselines. So little is known about this vast region that it is hard to know what “normal” is, and changes are hard to pin on fire, climate, grazing or invasive species.
• Short-term funding. Funders keep asking for new projects, so long-term monitoring cannot be sustained.
• No overall strategy. Activities overlap or leave gaps.
• Different priorities. Communities may want common game animals such as red kangaroos back, while national funding favours endangered species.
• Translating knowledge. Elders going out and saying “this is looking alright” does not give a “scientific” outcome, and staff found it hard to turn Indigenous perspectives into forms useful for science.
• Trust and ownership. Communities ask what happens to the information they collect and who owns it; cultural sensitivities can block even a reference to some knowledge.
• Knowledge being lost. As elders who lived off the land pass away, much of their detailed knowledge goes with them, and links with school education are weak.

Opportunities from the workshops

• Spatial: a managed bushfood zone near Ernabella, a refuge for bushfoods with denser tree cover, where hunting is controlled, invasive species are managed, and hunting effort and yield are recorded. Residents were concerned that hunting pressure was reducing favoured game, especially kangaroo.
• Temporal: recording seasonal events such as flowering, breeding, migration, hunting and harvesting times, for example on a seasonal calendar like the one made with the Ernabella community, to show change over the years and to pass knowledge between generations.

3. What they concluded

• Indigenous community-based monitoring in the region is not yet at the scale or scope needed to connect Anangu knowledge regularly with the management of country, or to provide regular jobs.
• Monitoring works best when Anangu monitor things they personally connect with, such as hunting game (kuka), harvesting bush foods (mai) or caring for water holes, rather than things needed only by outsiders.
• Communities that monitor local conditions regularly over the long term could improve data from remote areas and may lower the cost of monitoring.
• Building knowledge together (field trips, sharing stories, talking) matters as much as the data and reports produced.
• Traditional knowledge could provide an alternative baseline for rangeland condition, where Indigenous knowledge owners give permission.
• A formal regional monitoring strategy should cover the whole range of approaches, especially the under-used ones: traditional knowledge used for local community benefit, and science used for local benefit (for example, monitoring floods, fire risk and food insecurity).
• Monitoring needs to become a regular part of everyday life, with ongoing benefits for all, and institutions need to allow for cultural interpretations of place. Without a national framework, approaches will stay limited.

4. How tracking was or was not used

The authors did not track. They report that the region’s biodiversity monitoring includes recording animal tracks, and that Anangu help identify and record tracks, with data entered in CyberTracker with GPS. The paper gives no further detail on the tracking work.

5. Tracker or observer certification

Not reported. The paper says Anangu help identify and record tracks but says nothing about their tracking skill or any evaluation of it.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• CyberTracker GPS software, described as a digital, icon-based program that records field data in real time and suits people with low literacy. Interviewees found it useful because photos of land condition could be shared with community members who had not gone out on country.
• GPS with ArcPad or CyberTracker to map Buffel grass.
• Tablets for a digital storytelling project, with voice recording and film.
• Seasonal calendars and the Ara Irititja digital archive as ways to record and keep knowledge.

7. Implications for conservation (from the paper)

• Recognising and paying for the land care Indigenous people already do could bring lasting income to remote communities while improving natural resource management.
• Regular community monitoring could fill gaps in knowledge of vast, remote areas that staff cannot reach often.
• Monitoring of seasonal events could show gradual shifts caused by climate change.
• Without long-term, well-designed programmes, community monitoring risks being ineffective or seen as tokenistic.