Monitoring and Evaluation in Conservation: A Review of Trends and Approaches

This is a best practice for monitoring and evaluating systems focused on adaptive management (obtaining the information needed to manage projects) and impact assessments

Using conceptual models as a planning and evaluation tool in conservation

Conservation projects are dynamic interventions that occur in complex contexts involving intricate interactions of social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental factors. These factors are constantly changing over time and space as managers learn more about the context within which they work. This complex context poses challenges for planning and evaluating conservation project. In order for conservation managers and evaluation professionals to design good interventions and measure project success, they simultaneously need to embrace and deconstruct contextual complexity. In this article, we describe conceptual models--a tool that helps articulate and make explicit assumptions about a project's context and what a project team hopes to achieve. We provide real-world examples of conceptual models, discuss the relationship between conceptual models and other evaluation tools, and describe various ways that conceptual models serve as a key planning and evaluation tool. These include, for example, that they document assumptions about a project site and they provide a basis for analyzing theories of change. It is impractical to believe that we can completely eliminate detail or dynamic complexity in projects. Nevertheless, conceptual models can help reduce the effects of this complexity by helping us understand it.Conceptual model Conservation project Planning Evaluation Monitoring Impact Adaptive management Theory of change Management

Results Chains: a Tool for Conservation Action Design, Management, and Evaluation

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