Template and Guidelines for Developing Survey Protocols: Creating monitoring standards compatible with the Ecological Monitoring System of Australia

This document, a Template and Guidelines for Developing Survey Protocols: Creating monitoring standards compatible with the Ecological Monitoring System Australia (EMSA), guides users to develop field survey protocols similar to those created by the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network. The intended audience of this document are ecologists, environmental practitioners, and experts charged with documenting ecological field methodologies in a standardised, repeatable, and scientifically robust format.

This document should be read in conjunction with:

• The 20+ EMSA modules are readily available on the EMSA website (tern.emsa.org.au), and associated user guides, video tutorials, and supporting documents. We do not provide a specific example here, as we recommend that the user find an existing protocol with a similar purpose to the one they are creating. For example, it would be more useful to use one of the plot-based modules as a guide if your module is plot-based.
• Survey Guidelines for Monitoring Threatened Species: Towards monitoring standards compatible with the Ecological Monitoring System Australia (TERN 2025), which sets out key recommendations for monitoring threatened species populations, species-specific recommendations that identify best-practice methods for a select group of priority threatened species, and general information that can be applied to monitoring all species, regardless of conservation status.

Together, the EMSA modules, the Survey Guidelines for Monitoring Threatened Species, and this document aim to improve our knowledge of natural ecosystems, ecological communities, and threatened species by enhancing the accessibility and sharing of high-quality, robust scientific data. By developing best-practice field survey guidelines and recommendations, practitioners will be better equipped to understand the rationale for conducting standardised, repeatable surveys, their implementation, and typical ways to analyse the data collected.

By identifying the monitoring methods typically implemented by practitioners, documenting and assessing the techniques known to work, and identifying opportunities to standardise the methods, we can move towards ensuring all monitoring is ecosystem-appropriate, species-appropriate, comparable between practitioners and populations, and repeatable over time. Further, together with consistent terminology, guidelines, instructions, and data collection, we can refine efforts and resources to measure and share information. Data collected using robust, standardised methods will improve our knowledge of the ecological values of project areas, the presence and importance of areas to threatened species, and enable the impacts of potential disturbances to be assessed rigorously. The extension of EMSA to include a suite of protocols specifically designed to gather ecological data to inform impact assessment is essential to understanding the impact of development.