5.1 Monitoring and evaluation plan

Monitoring and evaluation focuses on progress and achievement of project objectives. . Good planning and design alone will not guarantee desired outcomes as discussed in Chapter 4, though relevant information on actions and outcomes is required to inform adaptative management and identify issues at an early phase. Therefore, indicators must be carefully identified for tracking progress. Some corrective actions may be required due to deficiencies in baseline assessments of site capability, but they are also increasingly important to capture change in external factors such as natural disturbances and climate variability. A well-designed monitoring system helps ensure that restoration is effective, measurable and accountable, which is key to attracting long-term support and investments. 

Designing, implementing and summarizing the results of a monitoring plan involves considering and integrating a number of factors or steps. It is important to note that a monitoring plan should be designed in tandem with restoration goals and objectives and the budget available. And it needs to consider a time frame before and after the restoration to allow you to analyse its success and to achieve the desired restoration objectives. It should be established prior to the commencement of any restoration work. Irrespective of the nature of the restoration project, objectives should be explicit, measurable, and should have a designated time frame. A Reference Condition Model (RCM, Chapter 1.4) is key to showing that the level of restoration proposed (i.e., ecological processes, component/habitat, or species level of organization), and the expected timeframe for ecosystem recovery (i.e., short versus long term) can be clearly connected to the restoration objectives proposed.  

It is well-documented that people have a bias toward optimism, meaning we overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes. It is therefore hardly surprising that restoration plans often underestimate the time required for ecosystem recovery or attainment of specific response thresholds. While the true variability of outcomes is captured by the RCM, for some indicators there may be only a little evidence of progress over many years. Therefore monitoring plans should identify and measure a variety of response indicators at appropriate levels of organization, and over realistic timeframes. If restoration is focused on the establishment of an ecosystem process (e.g.  physical alteration to standing canopy structure), the change in the environmental conditions may be measurable as soon as the work is complete. However, the “trickle-down effect” to finer levels of organization (i.e., component/habitat and species) may take many years. In places where restoration focuses on repairing the habitat of a particular species at risk, a plan would be to monitor the use of the restored habitat by the species over the longer term, acknowledging that there may be some delay between habitat recovery and species re-occupancy. Other important response variables for the species should also be monitored in the short term.