Draft success indicators demonstrating progress towards restoration in sanctuaries

Ongoing support for Sanctuaries may rest partly on measures taken of their progress towards goals, both ecological and social. Part of our research about Sanctuaries is to develop, justify and document these measures, and here we present four draft measures that we suggest capture different aspects of progress. We would like to obtain baseline measurements using them in as many Sanctuaries as possible in 2008, then take annual snapshots until 2013:

1. A measure of public participation: No. visitors per year, or no. involved volunteers per year.

2. A measure of indigenous dominance: Counts of abundance of resident bird species and Changes in 5 minute bird counts of native compared with exotic bird species in annual counts could supply the former; these will mainly reflect responses to pest control.

3. A measure of species occupancy: number of threatened species present. This will be influenced also by translocations, and are likely to be even more sensitive to residual abundances of key pests.

4. A measure of ecosystem process: Rates of pollination of fuchsia flowers. This flow-on outcome of increased native bird abundance is well researched and a ready-to-use survey procedure (www.biol.canterbury.ac.nz/pollination_survey/) was recently developed by other researchers, who would welcome this collaboration.

We will discuss these and other possible measures at the forthcoming annual Sanctuaries meeting at Bushy Park, Wanganui, 18-19 September 2008.