To measure and report the status of wildlife targets that we hold ourselves accountable for conserving within landscapes or seascapes has always been a challenge.

Our long experience surveying wildlife tells us that monitoring the area and distribution of occupancy (i.e., the presence or absence of a species within a landscape or seascape or across its geographic range) is the most cost-effective approach for tracking and reporting the changing status of both terrestrial and marine species. Very simply if a species occupies a larger area over time, then its population is growing and expanding its range, if the area of occupancy is shrinking; bad things are likely happening.

Modern occupancy methods are:

1. scientifically defensible;
2. methodologically agnostic (i.e., with careful design, results can be generated from aerial surveys of savanna animals, distance sampling of elephant dung, camera trap capture-recapture surveys, line-transects of wetland species, geolocated sightings by park rangers, 50m diver transects of reef fish and hard and soft coral, reports by indigenous community members and tourism operators, etc.); and
3. can generate easily visualized and interpreted results. 

Most importantly, this approach allows us to aggregate multiple sources of information into a single occupancy metric for each wildlife target within either our landscapes or seascapes.