Right-way fire in Australia's spinifex deserts: An approach for measuring management success when fire activity varies substantially through space and time.

Indigenous Australians used fire in spinifex deserts for millennia. These practices mostly ceased following European colonisation, but many contemporary Indigenous groups seek to restore 'right-way fire' practices, to meet inter-related social, economic, cultural and biodiversity objectives. However, measuring and reporting on the fire pattern outcomes of management is challenging, because the spatio-temporal patterns of right-way fire are not clearly defined, and because spatio-temporal variability in rainfall makes fire occurrence highly variable in these desert environments. We present an approach for measuring and reporting on fire management outcomes to account for spatio-temporal rainfall variability. The purpose is to support Indigenous groups to assess performance against their management targets, and lay the groundwork for developing an accredited method for valuing combined social, cultural and biodiversity outcomes. We reviewed fire management plans of desert Indigenous groups to identify spatial fire pattern indicators for right-way fire in spinifex deserts. We integrated annual rainfall surfaces with time-since fire mapping (using Landsat imagery) to create a new spatial dataset of accumulated rainfall-since-last-fire, that better represents post-fire vegetation recovery as categorised by local Indigenous people. The fire pattern indicators were merged into a single score using an environmental accounting approach. To strengthen interpretation, we developed an approach for identifying a control area with matching vegetation and fire history, up to the point of management. We applied these methods to a 125,000 ha case study area: Durba Hills, managed by the Martu people of Western Australia. Using a 20-year time series, we show that since right-way fire management at Durba Hills was re-introduced (2009), the fire pattern indicators have improved compared to those in the matched control area, and the composite result is closer to the fine-scaled mosaic of right-way fire pattern targets. Our approach could be used by Indigenous groups to track performance, and inform annual fire management planning. As the indicators are standardised for rainfall variation, results from multiple sites can be aggregated to track changes in performance at larger scales. Finally, our approach could be adapted for other fire-prone areas, both in Australia and internationally with high spatio-temporal rainfall variability, to improve management planning and evaluation.

How practitioners integrate decision triggers with existing metrics in conservation monitoring.

Decision triggers are defined thresholds in the status of monitored variables that indicate when to undertake management, and avoid undesirable ecosystem change. Decision triggers are frequently recommended to conservation practitioners as a tool to facilitate evidence-based management practices, but there has been limited attention paid to how practitioners are integrating decision triggers into existing monitoring programs. We sought to understand whether conservation practitioners' use of decision triggers was influenced by the type of variables in their monitoring programs. We investigated this question using a practitioner-focused workshop involving a structured discussion and review of eight monitoring programs. Among our case studies, direct measures of biodiversity (e.g. native species) were more commonly monitored, but less likely to be linked to decision triggers (10% with triggers) than measures being used as surrogates (54% with triggers) for program objectives. This was because decision triggers were associated with management of threatening processes, which were often monitored as a surrogate for a biodiversity asset of interest. By contrast, direct measures of biodiversity were more commonly associated with informal decision processes that led to activities such as management reviews or external consultation. Workshop participants were in favor of including more formalized decision triggers in their programs, but were limited by incomplete ecological knowledge, lack of appropriately skilled staff, funding constraints, and/or uncertainty regarding intervention effectiveness. We recommend that practitioners consider including decision triggers for discussion activities (such as external consultation) in their programs as more than just early warning points for future interventions, particularly for direct measures. Decision triggers for discussions should be recognized as a critical feature of monitoring programs where information and operational limitations inhibit the use of decision triggers for interventions.