Conservation Action Planning Measures of Success!

1. Conservation Action PlanningMeasures of Success! The Essentials

3. Measures Matter! • Tell us if our actions achieving their intended results • Enable adapting, learning, & sharing • Provide Early Warning if things change • Provide transparency and accountability • Secure future funding

4. What You Want to Know • Are your strategies working? • Are your threats declining?? • Are your targets stable or improving??? • Can you correct course if you need to???? • Was it all worthwhile?????

5. Measures are embedded • Look to your objectives • Look to your Key Ecological Attributes and indicators • Look to your threats table

6. For Example 1. Objectives and work plan (effectiveness monitoring)

7. 2. Target viability analyses

8. Effectiveness vs. status monitoring Effectiveness (1) Are our conservation actions having their intended impact? Status (2) How is the biodiversity we care about doing? (3) How are threats to biodiversity changing? (4) Is the capacity to improve conservation changing?

9. What about status monitoring? • Periodic check-ups • Blood pressure • Cholesterol • Early warning detection • If problem detected… • Take action • Monitor effectiveness

10. Balancing action, effectiveness, status Issues to consider: • Need for action given known, serious threats • Level of understanding of conservation targets, ecological processes, & likely impacts of threats • Degree of certainty in effectiveness (and risks) of alternative management strategies • Available resources

11. Useful monitoring plans Tips to reduce monitoring costs • Consider low-cost, qualitative options rather than no monitoring • Consider less frequent monitoring visits rather than no monitoring • Use partner data whenever possible • Engage local people & volunteers in monitoring efforts

12. Common monitoring pitfalls • Lack of a clearly stated purpose • Inefficient/ineffective indicators or methods • Data gathered but never summarized • Data summarized but not interpreted relative to objectives • Data summarized and interpreted but not relayed to managers • Data useful at the project level but lessons learned are never shared beyond the project

13. Measures The essential ingredient.... A small number of simple metrics designed to tell you about progress towards each of your OBJECTIVES

14. General Recommendation….. • Establish objective-based effectiveness measures and monitoring protocol first • Then add status indicators, as truly warranted

15. Objective-based Monitoring

16. Indicators: Acres of native ecological system burned. Number of hours between reporting and containment of fire event. Methods: Map location and extent of wildfire Notice and record events and times. Follow the trail from targets to objectives Objective: By 2009, reduce the amount of burned native ecological system to zero.Target: Montane wet forest, south slope mesic forestThreat: Wildfires

17. Indicators: Forest Cover # & length of forest openings Cubic meters of seized timber Methods: Remote Sensing Remote Sensing Seizure records + observed shipments Follow the trail from targets to objectives Pacaya-Samiria example Objective: By ___, decrease the extraction of natural resources by ___ amount.Target: Bosques de Colinas (Hill Forests) Threat: Illegal Logging (Very High)

18. Lessons from the School of Hard Knocks! • The Viability table is a place to harvest ideas for metrics but you won’t want or need to monitor everything on that table. • Beware a monitoring plan you will never execute. Or worse yet, one you will apply for a year or two and then abandon. • Never monitor something you can’t or won’t do anything about.

19. Critical Questions • Do you have at least one indicator and monitoring protocol for your priority objective(s)? • Have inconsequential, irrelevant or redundant indicators been excluded? Never monitor something you don’t intend to act on. • Can the monitoring plan be feasibly implemented? Remember… Monitoring requires time and money in your work plans & budgets

20. ExerciseEstablish Effectiveness Measures • Choose one objective for which you developed strategic actions. • “Follow the trail” from the strategic action to the objective to the threat to the target. • Review the threats table and viability table information. • Identify/choose indicator(s) to measure progress towards your objective. • Articulate the method(s) you would recommend to monitor the chosen indicators. • Put your “trail” on a flip chart. You have one hour.

21. Indicators: Miles of roads and trails actively used by OHV (threat) % of wetlands scarred by OHV trails (target) Method: GPS survey for select areas of forest Aerial photographic interpretation Objective: By 2010, Ensure reduction of at least 50% of off-road vehicle trails within the National Forest Target: Black bear, mesic flatwoods and prairiesThreat: Off-road vehicles

22. The Essence of Adaptive Management • Conservation Action Plans should be guides to action • They are hypotheses to be worked out in practice, to be rejected, corrected, and expanded as they fail or succeed in giving us the guidance needed to inform our present needs