One of the most unfortunate things about
government budget cutbacks is that when you delete a monitoring program you’re
not only throwing out the data from a single year, but you’re throwing out all
that you’ve invested over decades.
Regular monitoring is vital to keeping tabs on
the status of species and establishing trends, then to figuring out what has
caused the trend and whether there’s anything we can do about it, if it’s a
negative trend.
Without it, species will disappear quietly off
the face of the earth, perhaps due to causes we can manage and thus prevent
their extirpation.
In lieu of government, because politics plays
such an unfortunate role in consistent monitoring, non-profit groups are now
taking on the job.
For instance, Bird Studies Canada has compiled
data from the last 40 years to put together a picture of how this country’s
birds are faring, and there are some warning signs.
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