National Wild Dog Action Plan – National Metrics Project

Summary

​The monitoring, evaluation and reporting (MER) framework recommended by the workshop comprises:

1. A biennial survey of stakeholder perceptions in regard to wild dog control, undertaken as part of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) survey. The metric being measured is, essentially, satisfaction with the level of wild dog control. This will have little if any value in demonstrating changes in the actual impacts of wild dogs or the effects on these impact of specific control measures. However, it will provide a broad indication of the success of the national control effort and will capture some of the social value of dog control.
The survey will require funding.

2. The collection, analysis and reporting of metrics pertaining to inputs, activities and impacts of wild dogs (described above).

The data for these metrics will be collected at ground level by members of WDAGs. Because it is critical that data along with group-level metadata are collected together and reported in a consistent manner, standard operating procedures (SOPs) have been described above that define the suite of parameters, how each should be collected, the form in which each is to be captured, how each should be reported and the necessary metadata that must accompany the records. This SOP should be provided to each member of each WDAG.

Because there is a critical need for data quality oversight, and because there will be tendency to neglect data collection without prompting, regional or state coordinators with both wild dog understanding and data skills will be required across all jurisdictions.

The role description for the coordinators would include ensuring that data are collected by WDAGs according to the SOP, analysing / managing the data, submitting it for aggregation upwards as required and reporting it back to WDAG level. These steps would also be carried out according to an SOP.

Resourcing will be required to:
° Develop the WDAG and coordinator SOPs;
° Pay for the coordinators;
° Train WDAG members and coordinators as required; and
° Establish and maintain data collection mechanisms and databases.

If there is inadequate resourcing of this area, there is a high risk that biases will remain unadjusted in the data resulting in incorrect inferences being drawn from any apparent relationship between activities and events. The SOPs and data template ensures capacity to control for at least some of the voluntary reporting biases that are inevitably present in raw data of this type.

3. The conduct of periodic scientific surveys of dog activity and impacts, similar to that currently undertaken in Queensland, in order to monitor and assess the quality of the data gathered from WDAGs in (2) and to provide extra information for further control for any non-reporting bias remaining in estimates.

Resourcing will be required to undertake these surveys, which are likely to be run by the regional coordinators described in (2).