Week-long Intensive Conservation Planning Course Held at Mitchell Center

For the week of March 6-10, faculty, instructors, and students met at the Mitchell Center for a Conservation Planning course coordinated by Mitchell Center Faculty Fellows Aram Calhoun and Malcolm Hunter. The spring break intensive course—Ecology and Environmental Sciences (EES 598) “Designing and managing conservation projects”— focused on “sustainability planning with interdisciplinary groups and was thus very relevant to the Mitchell Center’s work,” according to Calhoun.

In addition to Calhoun and Hunter, there were four additional instructors: primary instructor John Morrison, director of Conservation Planning and Measures for the World Wildlife Fund based in Hope, Maine; Brian Henkel, Wild Acadia project coordinator, Friends of Acadia in Bar Harbor; Susan O’Neil, Senior Conservation Planning Manager, Long Live the Kings, Seattle, WA; and Cathy Plume, Principal, BlueGreenPlume, LLC, Washington, D.C. Twelve UMaine graduate students took part.

Course Summary

Faced with limited resources to confront growing challenges, conservation organizations must ensure that their efforts are strategic, systematic, and results-oriented. The Conservation Planning course introduced  students to the skills and knowledge needed to design and implement effective conservation projects and to generate clear evidence of their progress toward achieving conservation results.

The work was supported by the software planning tool Miradi, some components of which include: conceptualizing a project (including defining the team, scope, vision, targets, and threats); planning actions and monitoring (developing goals and strategies, developing a monitoring plan); and evaluating the capacity and risk. Three other cricital components not covered in the course included: implementing actions and monitoring; analyzing and adapting; and sharing learned experiences.

Students worked on project plans for three Maine initiatives with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (MDIFW) and US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS).    These included the Scarborough Marsh and Bud Leavitt Wildlife Management Areas (MDIFW) and wood turtle conservation (USFWS).

Below, three of the twelve UMaine graduate students participating in the week-long course—Carly Eakin, Anna Buckardt, and Kirstie Ruppert—provide their perspectives.

Carly Eakin is a Ph.D. candidate working with Calhoun and Hunter in the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Conservation Biology.

I study how urbanization influences vernal pool-breeding amphibians, specifically during larval stages. I come from the world of landscape architecture, and my mission has always been to design landscapes that support human needs while sustaining ecological function. After being a Peace Corps volunteer and working for a few years in landscape architecture I realized I didn’t know nearly enough about how to sustain ecological function and felt I needed to go back to school.

My motivation for taking this course—and for enrolling in my Ph.D. program—was to better understand how to apply science to assess and improve natural resource conservation strategies. As someone soon-to-be searching for a job focused on achieving conservation goals, I also saw this class as an opportunity to gain skills to help ensure conservation plans and actions align with goals.

The course focused on how to use an adaptive management process, Open Standards, that includes stakeholders, provides transparent decision-making, identifies and prioritizes specific actions, and encourages accountability. To me, the “core” of the course was working in small, interdisciplinary groups to design a conservation plan addressing a real-world management issue. (Open Standards are those made available to the general public and are developed, or approved, and maintained via a collaborative and consensus driven process.)

Working in this fashion demonstrated to me the potential for successful consensus-building among disparate stakeholders. In fact, the most important thing I took away from the class is that one must engage stakeholders because success is dependent on stakeholder buy-in at every step of the process, from identification of broad goals to the implementation of monitoring.

Another valuable lesson for me is that the Open Standards framework can be applied to any project but the specific approach (i.e., how the Open Standards process is applied) that is best suited for a project will become clear by engaging stakeholders.

I hope to use the Open Standards (or strategies within this framework) in my future work to increase the likelihood of meeting conservation goals, whether that be for a city park or a continent-wide management plan. I also have a new appreciation for the necessity to engage stakeholders even to understand what those conservation goals might be.

Anna Buckardt is a second-year master’s candidate in Wildlife Ecology.

I am studying the response of birds to young forest habitat management in Wisconsin.  This is my second semester at UMaine. I took the Conservation Projects course because I am interested in wildlife conservation, and because part of my research focuses on the conservation of two declining bird species, American Woodcock and Golden-winged Warbler. Although I wasn’t sure what the class was all about going into it, I found that it was really helpful and I believe I will use the planning and organization techniques were learned in the future, in both wildlife conservation planning and in general.

The course was unique in that it was a workshop-style collaboration between graduate students and agency professionals. We all got to share unique perspectives while working as a team to create conservation goals and strategies to meet those goals.

I appreciated the full emersion into the Open Standards process of conservation planning. I found it to be a valuable tool for mapping out conservation needs, threats, drivers, and potential strategies for meeting conservations goals. This process also gave me an opportunity to expand my network by interacting with professionals from Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The tools we used in this course are a great way to incorporate many perspectives and different stakeholders into a planning process to create, and map out a plan to achieve, common conservation goals.

Kirstie Ruppert is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Conservation Biology

After graduating from UCLA with by B.S. in Environmental Science, I started working for the research arm of the San Diego Zoo, where my focus was redirected towards the study of human-environment interactions. After a few years centered around informal conservation learning and education program evaluation, I joined the human-dimensions component of our field conservation program.

There are in situ conservation initiatives all around the world, and in many cases, the community element of these projects has been neglected. Through this work, I realized I’m really passionate about human dimensions research and I wanted to pursue my Ph.D. Fortunately, I was connected with Carly Sponarski in the UMaine Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Conservation Biology.

I’m hoping my dissertation will build on our research at San Diego Zoo Global, which is based in the conservancies of northern Kenya. Across this landscape, pastoralist communities live in direct overlap with wildlife, and the success of conservation there depends on community partnerships. Due to the nature of this work, enrolling in the conservation planning course was a natural fit.

Mac and Aram connected course participants with three sets of clients at US Fish & Wildlife Service and Maine Department of Inland Fisheries &Wildlife. Using their current sites as case studies, we worked through the Open Standards strategic planning framework to offer potential strategies for management of their conservation targets.

On a different but related note, this ties into the work of the Mitchell Center as I would make the case that all three of the case studies were very much sustainability solution-focused; the basis of the adaptive management framework is focused on the social-ecological context of a conservation challenge and adaptive response to what is threatening conservation targets. The framework looks at how certain strategies balance human and ecosystem needs in a strategic and data-driven way through monitoring and evaluation plans.

Course participants, both students and agency partners, brought diverse perspectives to the week and really made a strong case for richly interdisciplinary team science, which I believe is one of the pillars of the Mitchell Center.

By David Sims, Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions