Identify People Involved in Your Project

• Team structure for the Lower Missouri River CAP--a multiple partner, large scale project.  To accommodate the large spatial scale and large group size of the key participants in the CAP, a Core Team and Support Team were assembled in addition to the workshop participants.  Key lessons learned from this process include: (1) limit the Core Team to 5-7 members and establish single shared vision for process, (2) having a broad CAP support team helped to spread the work around but is most effective when a leader is identified and roles are clearly defined, and (3) ideally, workshop participants will include key science and field staff from partner organizations as well as senior managers from those same organizations and a core group of participants will be involved across all workshops.
• Involving partners and stakeholders in the planning and implementation of the Babeldaob Conservation Action Plan.  The core team was a small but diverse group of people with from The Nature Conservancy, the national and a local non-government partner conservation organization. Key lessons learned from this process include: (1) a situation analysis was a very valuable tool for helping build a collective understanding of what is needed to protect the biodiversity of the area among partners, (2) having the main players working on Babeldaob on the CAP team helped to advance the implementation of strategies, and (3) a missing element was the inclusion of community members on core team or at workshops which may have further assisted implementation in this region with many local communities that are affected by strategies.
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Target Selection and Scope

• Utilizing Ecoregional Assessments and local experts to define scope and select freshwater targets in the Paw Paw River Watershed, Michigan.  This case study illustrates the interplay between ecoregion scale assessments of priority places and conservation action plans to develop strategies to conserve these priority places.  This team used targets from two TNC Ecoregional Assessments to define the scope of the CAP. However these targets were only terrestrial.  When refining the scope for the CAP process, the team decided to use a watershed boundary for planning and to update the ERA to include this aquatic system as a priority.
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Assess Target Viability

• Involving Local Experts in the Viability Assessment of the Lake Wales Ridge Archipelago, Florida.  This team used a two-step approach to assess
  the viability of the biodiversity targets using first a review of existing literature and second a one-day expert workshop.  Lessons learned from this process include: (1) initial preparation work ensures more efficient use of experts knowledge and time, (2) drawing upon experts leads to better results than if viability assessment was completed by the core team alone, but (3) one-day was not enough time, and (4) it was still difficult to get experts to recommend “fair” and “good” rankings.
• Incorporating Ecoregional Goals into the San Miguel/Lower Dolores Rivers Viability Assessment.  This team set out to develop a consistent way to complete CAPs across the state of Colorado such that the results could be rolled up to account for goals set in Ecoregional Assessments. This pilot CAP used ecoregional goals, such as minimum size criteria for ecological systems, to set thresholds for desired status of viability indicators.  The team learned that: (1) by linking these assessments, all work done locally contributes to ecoregional goals and ensures that local and ecoregional priorities are aligned, (2) the CAP could be completed more quickly because existing work could be utilized, and (3) the information was generally stronger since the ERA had been through the peer review process.  Gaps in information from the ERA can pose difficulties and accounting for ecoregional targets takes some time.
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Identify Critical Threats

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Conduct Situation Analysis

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Develop Strategies: Objectives & Actions

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Establish Measures

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Develop Work Plans

• Capacity Assessment and Philanthropy Strategy development for the Arbuckle Plains and Blue River, Oklahoma.  This team conducted a current and desired capacity assessment, a budget for philanthropy and key communications products during the strategy development and work planning process to help ensure conservation strategies could be implemented.  The process helped: (1) document the need for certain strategies to be developed, (2) made it easier to sell the implementation of new strategies to our directors, and (3) assist philanthropy staff in fundraising by providing ready numbers and demonstrate what certain funding levels will do for the program. An executive summary document provided quick orientation to the project for new staff, and later as a fundraising tool.

Implementation and Project Capacity

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Analyze, Adapt, Learn & Share

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