Biodiversity Health Index: Assessing Site Suitability for Species Survival and Ecological Services

1. Biodiversity Health IndexMain Streams for Life John MacKinnon UNDP consultant June 2012

2. What is it? • Biodiversity Health is taken as the suitability of a site to continue to provide secure conditions for survival of component species and delivery of key ecological services, including resilience to climate and other changes. • BHI is a not an evaluation. It is a dynamic, constantly varying index that reflects biodiversity health, just as a financial index reflects economic performance.

3. Why use it ? • BHI provides a baseline against which targets for maintaining or achieving a given level of health can be set • BHI can be used as a results based indicator of project achievement and impacts • BHI can indicate where the project is succeeding or failing and allow revision of activity efforts throughout the project • BHI is complimentary to the Management Effectiveness scorecard in project M & E.

4. What does it include ? There are three main components to the index • Habitat condition • Species welfare • Socio-economic context

5. A comment on stability Although biodiversity can flourish under stable conditions, the BHI score does not necessarily reflect stability. Many wetland sites are very dynamic but what we are interested in is the ability of the biota to adapt to or even thrive with the changes. This will become increasingly important as climate and water flow patterns change.

6. Components of Habitat Condition • Maintenance of habitat extent and diversity • Maintenance of habitat quality (productivity, water supply, pollution, damage and physical conditions – oxygen, temperature, turbidity) • Adequacy of habitat connectivity • Stability of site (natural disasters) • Resilience to threats and changes • Levels of existing or planned threats

7. Components of species welfare • Containing and maintaining diversity of representative species (including important target species) • Indicator species show numerical stability or increases (good breeding levels, low mortality rates) • Incidence of hunting, poaching, alien species, new colonisation • Sustainability of harvest of commercial species • Response to disasters (fire, floods, droughts, pollution)

8. Elements of socio-economic context • Pressures on habitat and species from local communities (degree of dependence on natural resources, sustainability of off-take, etc.) • Additional threats or stresses from external developments (existing or planned) • Success of alternative livelihoods • Impacts from tourism or other disturbance • Levels of respect, support and co-management in protection, monitoring, research, fire fighting, etc.

9. The BHI process • Forming the monitoring team • Classifying and mapping main habitat types • Identifying main threats to be monitored • Identifying suitable indicator species to be monitored • Undertake baseline measurements • Calculate baseline index • Periodically repeat measurements • Analyze observed changes in relation to established targets • Report results and feed into project planning revisions (Fist 6 steps will have expert assistance, local teams can undertake after that)

10. Need for simplicity and robustness • The BHI scorecard is designed for simplicity and robustness • Different teams should reach similar scores • Team members do not require high levels of litteracy, biological knowledge or statistical skills!!

11. Identifying key threats • Key threats have already been identified for each project area at the PIF stage. These can be reviewed at PPG stage. • Additional threats can be tagged for attention when local teams are assembled or if unpredicted changes occur during the project cycle.

12. Selection of indicator species • Conservation target species (n.b. rarely seen species give little data) • Commoner species that are sensitive to habitat quality – amphibia, dragonflies, birds • Easily identified – large mammals • Easily quantified (harvest levels of fish, crabs etc. or plants) • Alien species of concern

13. Indicator species selected to indicate different things

14. Monitoring habitat extent • Relatively simple habitat classification, mapped and measured from satellite or aerial imagery with some ground truthing • Resampled at minimum yearly intervals (maybe in 2 different seasons) • Routine ground monitoring can record condition details (see model report form)

15. Example habitat classification

16. Example of simple survey form

17. BHI Reporting Form

18. Reducing variance • Comparisons of counts of species or habitat extent or condition should be made in similar conditions of season and climate, location and methodology to allow for fairer comparison of trends. • Most of the species and habitat data required for BHI can be incorporated into routine monitoring programme of the wetland sites concerned.

19. Users Guideto be developed by consultant • Provides notes for each question to be completed • Suggests methodology to be used for each score including some examples • Provides standard inventory or monitoring techniques • Suggests standard parametric and non-parametric tests for testing significance of observed changes

20. Training workshop • It is suggested that the consultant hold a training workshop in one of the project sites and staff from each other site can participate to undertake one demo baseline survey

21. Thank You ! 谢谢 !