SREL Reprint #3204

The Value of Long-Term Monitoring

J. Whitfield Gibbons

Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, Aiken, South Carolina, USA

Introduction: The contrasts between inventory and monitoring or between qualitative and quantitative sampling are greatest when short-term inventories (e.g., localized, single-season efforts) are compared with long-term monitoring studies that have been conducted over many years with a broad regional emphasis. Long-term monitoring can be particularly important in studies with reptiles because of the annual variability and unpredictability in apparent abundance of most species in response to seasonal weather conditions. Thus, a short-term inventory may not reveal the presence of a reptile species in any single year or even several, although the species is ultimately found to be locally abundant following long-term monitoring efforts. Long-term monitoring may successfully reveal that a species is present because of timing (monitoring eventually was conducted during a year when the species was apparent), spatial extension of sampling efforts (because of continued monitoring, new habitats were explored), or because of the use of different trapping methods that had not been used earlier. For truly rare or highly secretive species for which observations are usually serendipitous, long-term monitoring will be more likely to reveal a species' presence in an area simply because of the increased opportunities for encounter. . .

SREL Reprint #3204

Gibbons, J. W. 2012. The Value of Long-Term Monitoring. pp. 29-32 In: R. W. McDiarmid, M. S. Foster, C. Guyer, J. W. Gibbons, and N. Chernoff (Eds.). Reptile Biodiversity: Standard Methods for Inventory and Monitoring. University of California Press, Berkeley.

This information was provided by the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory (srel.uga.edu).