This page is about monitoring biodiversity loss, and looking for early warning evidence when biodiversity is declining

This is what you should be looking for...
Monitoring biodiversity loss will show up many insidious symptoms. This often confuses people who have been trained to think they are looking at 'real' problems, when they are not.

The statement above is deliberately challenging!!
Please keep an open mind until you have read all of this section.

The people who have accepted the reality of biodiversity loss are the ones who have most changed their financial, family and environmental outcomes).

Some of the symptoms people see - and common thinking says are problems, include:

• Declining productivity
  Previous generations in many countries have remarked how productive their land was when first opened up for farming. Then productivity gradually declined as biodiversity loss impacted their ecosystem processes and drained their soil energy levels. The energy was mined out by cropping or inappropriate grazing management.
• Rising costs of production
  The decline in productivity is often arrested by pouring in more inputs of external energy. Because this energy was relatively available and cheap, until recently there was little biodiversity monitoring and the situation went unnoticed and undetected, even though the symptoms gained severity.

  As ecosystem processes decline, costs of production begin to rise. In Australia it is widely known that when land was first cleared for wheat production, yields were quite high. Now, the old-timers say, 'once we could grow a ton per acre with no inputs. Now we can't grow anything without using large amounts of fertiliser'.

• Decreasing profitability
  There is no doubt the escalating inputs often dramatically increase yields, yet many times the unexpected result is decreased profitability and increased reliance on bank or supplier credit for inputs such as fertilisers and chemicals.
Note: There is an important distinction between the application of fertilisers which minerally balance soils and the excessive application of fertilisers that supply external energy into the production process. The need for large amounts of external fertiliser and/or chemical energy into a farm production system strongly suggests that there is a deeper problem that should be considered. Just because everybody is doing it does not mean that it is either right or that you must do it! But it may take time to wean the land off its energy 'drug'.


• Other savings
  Declining profitability causes farmers to look for other savings, and often the first 'saving' made is a reduction in the labour employed on the farm. Employees are sacked and the farmer and his family 'tighten their belt' another notch, struggling to do both their own work and the work their employees once did. They rarely see the real cause of this decline as biodiversity loss, but believe the economists who tell them it is about declining terms of trade.
• New enterprises
  Sometimes the farmers respond to biodiversity loss by adding a new enterprise to their business. Very often they begin off-farm contracting, perhaps supplying their labour part-time to another farmer. Sometimes they make the decision to purchase bigger machinery (with the associated increase in overhead expenses). As the new equipment allows them to complete their own work faster, they reason they will have time available to go contracting, and use this income to pay for the equipment.
• Families split
  Too often I have seen families split as biodiversity fails. I have seen families decide that the wife/mother should leave for work in a regional centre, returning home only at weekends because the farm can no longer support the family unit. In reality biodiversity loss means the farm can no longer support the family unit.
• Working days get longer, harder and more frequent
  As biodiversity decreases, working days get both longer and harder. Time for 'time off' becomes more and more difficult to find. Community organisations such as local sporting clubs begin to decline, often very rapidly.
• Communities decline
  It becomes common to see entire communities in decline. Retrenched employees sometimes remain in the district but more often they leave the district and their industry, searching for more stable employment, which they mostly find in the cities. Their skills are lost to the 'bush' forever. As people leave, the schools begin to decline, the hospitals cannot function properly, the banks are no longer as profitable and begin to close their local branches, and the shops find life increasingly difficult.
• Life becomes less enjoyable
  As their life becomes much less enjoyable, farmers begin to say to their children:
  'You should go and get a job somewhere else. Coming home to our farm is a form of child abuse!'
• Droughts and floods tend to become more severe
  On the land, there is a gradual tendency for each drought or flood to seem to be a bit more severe than last time. Crops fail more often, and it is increasingly difficult to run stock in dry times without ever more external inputs such as hay, silage or grain supplementation.
• Soil structure declines
  Soil structures are usually in decline, and advisers respond by recommending an increased inputs of chemicals, fertilisers and micro-organisms. Until recently little thought was given to monitoring biodiversity and the effect of biological decline on soils.
• Bigger machinery is required
  As soil health declines, bigger tractors are required to pull machinery through the depleting ground. These bigger machines increase the overheads of the business, and if there is not a matching increase in productivity and income, profitability must decline even further.

Other names for biodiversity loss
You are probably aware of other names for biodiversity loss. Sometimes it is referred to as 'desertification'. Sometimes people talk about 'urban drift'. Almost always people think these are descriptions of a problem 'over there, somewhere', when almost certainly it is happening to them at home whilst they are thinking those thoughts.

Ocassionally biodiversity loss is rapid and spectacular, but more often it is slow and insidious, and is unrecognised until too late.

Always the result is the same: declining biological health of the land is accompanied by declining wealth of all the people who depend on that land for their sustenance and their wealth.

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