Effective conservation requires addressing three fundamental questions whose answers can only be sought in conservation practice: (1) What should our goals be and how do we measure progress in reaching them? (2) How can we most effectively take action to achieve conservation? and (3) How can we learn to do conservation better? This essay provides a conceptual framework and research agenda for a conservation science that uses the principles of adaptive management to answer these questions. The framework is based on a general model of a conservation project. The conservation target involves defining the specific area or population the project is trying to influence. This target is affected by direct and indirect threats and opportunities; we provide a table of potential direct threats. Conservation actions that are taken to counter these threats can be divided into approaches, strategies, and specific tools; we present a comprehensive table of potential approaches. Finally, the practicioners that take these actions include individuals, organizations, project alliances, and networks; we define the specific functional roles necessary to achieve effective adaptive management. We then use this framework to outline a research agenda for conservation science that involves defining clear and practical measures of conservation success, determining sound guiding principles for using conservation strategies and tools, and developing the knowledge and skills in individuals and organizations for good adaptive management and thus for making conservation more effective.Mejoramiento de la Práctica de la Conservación: un Marco Conceptual y un Programa Para la Ciencia de la Conservación Resumen: La conservación efectiva requiere trafar tres preguntas fundamentales cuyas respuestas solo pueden encontrarse en la práctica de la conservación: 1) ¿ Cuales deben ser nuestras metas y como medimos el progreso en alcanzarlas? 2) ¿ Cómo podemos realizar acciones más efectivas para lograr la conservación? y 3) ¿ Como podemos contestar a llevar a cabo mejor la conservación? Este ensayo proporciona un marco conceptual y un programa de investigación para una ciencia de la conservación que utiliza los principios del manejo adaptativo para responder estas preguntas. El marco se basa en un modelo general de un proyecto de conservación. El objetivo de conservación involucra la definición del sitio específico o población afectada por el proyecto. Este objetivo es afectado por amenazas directas e indirectas; proporcionamos una tabla de amenazas directas potenciales y otros factores. Las acciones de conservación que se realizan para contrarrestar estas amenazas se pueden dividir en aproximaciones, estrategias y herramientas específicas; presentamos una extensa tabla de aproximaciones potenciales. Finalmente, los actores que pueden participar incluyen individuos, organizaciones, alianzas de proyectos y redes que practican la conservación; definimos los papeles funcionales específicos necesarios para alcanzar un manejo adaptativo eficiente. Luego utiliza...

There is growing recognition among conservation practitioners and scholars that good project management is integrally linked to well-designed monitoring and evaluation systems. Most conservation organizations have attempted to develop and implement monitoring and evaluation systems, often with mixed results. One problem seems to be that organizations are trying to build their systems from scratch, overlooking lessons learned from the many efforts to develop useful and practical monitoring and evaluation approaches. Thus, we undertook a review of monitoring and evaluation approaches in conservation and other fields including international development, public health, family planning, education, social services, and business. Here, we present our results for the field of conservation. We categorized the considerable variety of monitoring and evaluation approaches into four broad purposes: basic research; accounting and certification; status assessment; and effectiveness measurement. We focus here on status assessment and effectiveness measurement. Specific lessons that emerged follow: different monitoring and evaluation needs require different approaches; conceptual similarities are widespread among prevailing approaches; inconsistent language impedes communication; confusion among monitoring and evaluation components hinders practitioner ability to choose the appropriate component; and monitoring only quantitative biological variables is insufficient. We suggest that the conservation community continue support of collaborative initiatives to improve monitoring and evaluation, establish clear definitions of commonly used terms, clarify monitoring and evaluation system components, apply available approaches appropriately, and include qualitative and social variables in monitoring efforts.Key Words: adaptive management, management effectiveness, status assessment Monitoreo y Evaluación en Conservación: una Revisión de Tendencias y MétodosResumen: Entre los practicantes y estudiosos de la conservación hay el reconocimiento creciente de que la buena gestión de proyectos está ligada integralmente a sistemas de monitoreo y evaluación bien diseñados. La mayoría de las organizaciones de conservación han intentado desarrollar e implementar sistemas de monitoreo y evaluación, a menudo con resultados mixtos. Un problema parece ser que las organizaciones están tratando de construir sus sistemas a partir de cero, sin considerar lecciones aprendidas de los muchos esfuerzos para desarrollar métodos de monitoreo y evaluaciónútiles y prácticos. Por lo tanto, hicimos una revisión de métodos de monitoreo y evaluación en conservación y otros campos incluyendo desarrollo internacional, salud pública, planificación familiar, educación, servicios sociales y negocios. Aquí, presentamos nuestros resultados para el campo de la conservación. Clasificamos la considerable variedad de métodos de monitoreo y evaluación en cuatro propósitos generales: investigación básica; contabilidad y certificación; evaluación de estatus y medidas de efectivida...

A commonly held belief is that if people can benefit financially from enterprises that depend on nearby forests, reefs, and other natural habitats, then they will take action to conserve and sustainably use them. The Biodiversity Conservation Network brought together conservation and development organizations and local communities to systematically test this hypothesis across 39 conservation project sites in Asia and the Pacific. Each project implemented one or more community‐based enterprises such as setting up an ecotourism lodge, distilling essential oils from wild plant roots, producing jams and jellies from forest fruits, harvesting timber, or collecting marine samples to test for pharmaceutical compounds. Each project team collected the biological, enterprise, and social data necessary to test the network's hypothesis. We present the results of this test. We found that a community‐based enterprise strategy can lead to conservation, but only under limited conditions and never on its own. We summarize the specific conditions under which an enterprise strategy will and will not work in a decision chart that can be used by project managers to determine whether this strategy might make sense at their site. We also found that an enterprise strategy can be subsidized and still create a net gain that pays for conservation. Based on our experiences, we recommend developing “learning portfolios” that combine action and research to test other conservation strategies.

There is a growing debate over the extent to which integrated conservation and development projects are contributing to conservation. One of the chief reasons for this debate is that there are few if any standardized and cost‐effective methods for defining and measuring conservation success so that different projects can be assessed over time or compared to other projects in different ecological and socioeconomic contexts. Current biologically based approaches to measuring conservation outcome have a number of practical limitations that preclude their use by typical project teams. As a result, most project teams do not measure project outcome and thus find it difficult to determine whether their interventions are working. To address this problem, we have developed an approach called threat reduction assessment (TRA) that measures project outcome. We explore the background for this approach, focusing on program evaluation in other disciplines, including engineering and public health; next we develop a model of the conservation and development context. We then propose one way in which this approach might be implemented through the calculation of a TRA index. Finally, we present and analyze examples of the approach in use in projects from Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Madagascar. We found that although the TRA approach has the theoretical disadvantages of being a proxy measurement of biodiversity and is subject to bias, it has the theoretical advantages of being sensitive to changes over short time periods and throughout a project site, and of allowing comparison among projects in different settings. Furthermore, it is practical and cost‐effective because it is based on data collected through simple techniques, it is directly related to project interventions, it is readily interpreted by project staff, and it can be done in retrospect. Although the TRA approach will need further refinement, it could be an important complement to biological approaches to measuring conservation project success.

Every day, the challenges to achieving conservation grow. Threats to species, habitats, and ecosystems multiply and intensify. The conservation community has invested decades of resources and hard work to reduce or eliminate these threats. However, it struggles to demonstrate that its efforts are having an impact. In recent years, conservation project managers, teams, and organizations have found themselves under increasing pressure to demonstrate measurable impacts that can be attributed to their actions. To do so, they need to answer three important questions: (1) Are we achieving our desired impact?; (2) Have we selected the best interventions to achieve our desired impact?; and (3) Are we executing our interventions in the best possible manner? We describe results chains, an important tool for helping teams clearly specify their theory of change behind the actions they are implementing. Results chains help teams make their assumptions behind an action explicit and positions the team to develop relevant objectives and indicators to monitor and evaluate whether their actions are having the intended impact. We describe this tool and how it is designed to tackle the three main questions above. We also discuss the purposes for which results chains have been used and the implications of their use. By using results chains, the conservation community can learn, adapt, and improve at a faster pace and, consequently, better address the ongoing threats to species, habitats, and ecosystems

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There is growing interest in evidence‐based conservation, yet there are no widely accepted standard definitions of evidence, let alone guidance on how to use it in the context of conservation and natural resource management practice. In this paper, we first draw on insights of evidence‐based practice from different disciplines to define evidence as being the “relevant information used to assess one or more hypotheses related to a question of interest.” We then construct a typology of different kinds of information, hypotheses, and evidence and show how these different types can be used in different steps of conservation practice. In particular, we distinguish between specific evidence used to assess project hypotheses and generic evidence used to assess generic hypotheses. We next build on this typology to develop a decision tree to support practitioners in how to appropriately use available specific and generic evidence in a given conservation situation. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of how to better promote and enable evidence‐based conservation in both projects and across the discipline of conservation. Our hope is that by understanding and using evidence better, conservation can both become more effective and attract increased support from society.