BugWise

Despite the importance of invertebrates in the environment and their potential as monitoring tools, they are generally ignored in habitat assessments. There are two fundamental reasons for this:

1. Invertebrate diversity and abundance

Identifying invertebrates often requires specialist equipment such as high powered microscopes and computers to store vast amounts of information. Photo: © J Gollan.

Although invertebrates are quite easy to collect in the field, the detailed process of taxonomic identification back at the lab presents some major obstacles.

These barriers include:

• Laboratory processing of collected material can be extremely costly and time consuming.
• Identification of invertebrates to species is often difficult, and requires specialised knowledge.
• It can be difficult to make valid conclusions when comparing populations of invertebrates between locations.

2. Current methods are unsuitable for community use

The majority of habitat improvement projects in Australia are carried out by volunteers and community land care groups. Current habitat assessment methods remain beyond the budgets and capacities of most of these groups of enthusiastic and committed volunteers. It is therefore very difficult to measure the success or progress of habitat improvement projects.

BugWise aims to address this problem through new methods that anyone can use.