Indicator taxa that are particularly valuable for monitoring are those that are both sensitive to management impacts and cost-efficient to sample.

Because different species and species groups have distinct ecological requirements, and interact with their local environment at distinct spatial and temporal scales, combining multiple ecological indicator groups, each encompassing individual species that exhibit a wide range of responses to disturbance, can help in understanding a range of management impacts on multiple levels of ecological organization.

Accounting for differences in survey cost among taxa requires a detailed audit of the cost of field and laboratory work, followed by a comparison of standardized costs that recalibrates sampling effort into units of money or time.

Once a set of viable and cost-effective candidate indicator groups has been identified, additional considerations can provide further guidance for identifying the species groups that will provide the most useful information for management, including: the level of prior ecological knowledge to help the interpretation of sample data; the extent to which an indicator group can be applied to other regions and management systems; and the extent to which individual groups succeed in capturing the disturbance responses of other taxa.

Individual target species can provide complementary information on management impacts to that which can be derived from indicator groups, and include those species that play particularly important functional roles in the forest ecosystem, are highly threatened, or are of particular economic or cultural value to stakeholders. Species of economic and cultural importance can include those that are harvested by local people (e.g. for game), as well as invasive and pest species. Other species may be valuable to include in monitoring because they are effective at garnering public support for conservation.