Chapter 12 Adaptive Management and Evidence-Based Conservation

Discussion Questions

1. Most of the examples in this chapter focused on monitoring and evaluating particular species. What are some examples of conservation interventions or projects that might be monitored using remotely sensed data or the sorts of images that appear on Google Earth?
2. Discuss the ethics of applying triage to the conservation of endangered species. Focus your discussion on how conservationists should spend the money currently available, rather than on how much money society should spend on conservation.
3. Suppose you work for a conservation group attempting to save the island scrub jay (see Chapter 10 “Consider This” essay). What are some of the risks of using an adaptive management approach? When might the risks outweigh the benefits? Now suppose you work for the sustainability office of a large mining corporation and you want to identify where and how to mitigate the damages that the mining operation does to biodiversity. What are some of the risks of using an adaptive management approach? And when might the risks outweigh the benefits?

Group Projects

• Go to the Global Environment Facility (GEF) website and select the “Project and Funding” tab to search a database of projects. For the focal area, select “Biodiversity.” Choose two nations for each of which there exist at least five projects with terminal evaluation reports (not every project has this terminal evaluation report, but most do). Read the reports and discuss factors that may have influenced the success of GEF projects in the two countries you selected.
  
  
• Go to the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence library of completed systematic reviews. Read two of the available reports and write a brief statement comparing the strength of the evidence summarized by each review. Be sure to consider the number of independent studies that were reviewed, the quality (such as size, duration, and replication) of the individual studies, and other aspects of the review.
  
  
• Use the Internet to find three citizen science groups that help count plants or animals. What measures do these groups take to enhance the credibility of their data or counts? Discuss the relative conservation value of the information these groups gather.

Useful Websites

• Centre for Evidence-Based Conservation produces and disseminates systematic reviews on the effectiveness of management and policy interventions. http://www.cebc.bangor.ac.uk


• The Cochrane Collaboration is a pioneering supporter of evidence-based medicine. Their website provides access to systematic reviews for a huge variety of healthcare interventions. http://www.cochrane.org


• Collaboration for Environmental Evidence provides guidelines for systematic reviews and hosts a library of competed reviews. http://www.environmentalevidence.org


• Conservation Evidence is an online, peer-reviewed journal that promotes the systematic review of the conservation literature. http://www.conservationevidence.com


• Conservation Measures Partnership is a partnership of conservation NGOs. The group focuses on developing methods that can be broadly used to monitor and evaluate conservation projects. http://www.conservationmeasures.org/


• Foundations of Success is a non-profit organization that promotes and teaches adaptive management principles to conservation practitioners. http://www.fosonline.org


• The Global Environment Facility is an international organization that funds projects in developing nations with the goal of addressing global environmental issues. It is the funding mechanism for the Convention on Biological Diversity and other international treaties related to the environment. www.thegef.org


• Platte River Recovery Implementation Program provides details of the adaptive management approach being used to recover the threatened and endangered species of the Platte River. https://www.platteriverprogram.org/


• Science Friday offers a video story about a breeding program designed to bolster the horseshoe crab population in Long Island, New York. http://www.sciencefriday.com/video/07/15/2010/beach-season-for-horseshoe-crabs.html

Suggested Readings for In-class Discussion

• Allen CR, Gunderson LH (2011) Pathology and failure in the design and implementation of adaptive management. J Environ Manag 92: 1379-1384.
  
  
• Bonney R, Shirk JL, Phillips TB, Wiggins A, Ballard HL, et al. (2014) Next steps for citizen science. Science 343: 1436-1437.
  
  
• Cook CN, Hockings M, Carter R (2009) Conservation in the dark? The information used to support management decisions. Front Ecol Environ 8: 181-186.
  
  
• Murphy DD, Weiland PS (2014) Science and structured decision making: Fulfilling the promise of adaptive management for imperiled species. J Envron Stud Sci 4: 200-207. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13412-014-0165-0 (open access)
  
  
• Woodcock P, Pullin AS, Kaiser MJ (2014) Evaluating and improving the reliability of evidence syntheses in conservation and environmental science: A methodology. Biol Conserv 176: 54-62. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320714001712 (open access)