Question 1: A great question about how the HCV reports on this website address the messy business of MONITORING Plans. (Thanks Glen Dunsworth):
"...a very comprehensive report and excellent description of HCVF process, my only criticism is that the effectiveness monitoring part seems to simply point to MNR folks to do the work and there doesn't seem to be any description of how the effectiveness monitoring would be conducted and how it would link back in and adaptive management way to meeting the objectives of the management strategies? I admit to jumping around a bit in the document and not reading it fully cover to cover. Did i miss something?"
Good question. You are correct that these reports direct the auditor/ public to the person responsible for monitoring rather than describing the monitoring program itself.
In a "living" document (sorry for the cliché) , we are supposed to keep everything up to date. That is why I use as many links as I do. In practice, it is very difficult to keep plans and descriptions up to date. If we could do annual updates maybe it would work, but Companies do not want to pay for that. It would take several days to do a full edit of a report. I think it is better to pin the person down who actually writes the monitoring plan. Monitoring is the worst problem because it is the science guys who do the heavy lifting. But who can find them? Hence phone and email addresses.
For example, keeping up with Caribou management and monitoring in Ontario would be a nightmare of the first order. Better to call the experts. They will send the most recent monitoring documents. Auditors have to call anyway, or they will wind up reviewing out of date reports.
Monitoring programs done locally struggle to reach a scientifically valid sample size. There are a few exceptions. I note that some of the BC forest companies on the coast have some good monitoring programs in house. But in the Boreal, not so much. On the whole it is very expensive to monitor a bunch of species scientifically.
Auditors have supported the approach I use in these HCV reports. And they have all been able to get answers to their monitoring questions. In the end, the HCV report is just a communications document. It does not drive any management or monitoring on its own.
I am not going to answer your linkage to adaptive management here. It is addressed through the planning system in Ontario. Not perfect by any means, but it does force adaptation in a system that really wants to let the concrete set.
So that is my practical solution.