Conservation by Design in Practice:

Global Conservation Science

Global science and indicators encompass a variety of broad-scale, spatially explicit analyses of biodiversity, habitat condition, and threats to the world’s freshwater, marine and terrestrial ecosystems.  These are essential to informing global conservation priorities, influencing environment and development policies, and supporting conservation actions.

Programmatic emphases include:

• Identifying global conservation gaps and priorities;
• Assessing critical global-scale conservation challenges;
• Raising awareness and understanding about emerging issues;
• Developing and promoting indicators that can inform policy and funding decisions; and
• Making these data and information available to decision-makers and practitioners around the world. 

A global approach to conservation is essential for elevating issues onto international policy agendas, and finding practical solutions to challenges that are becoming increasingly global.  Used in concert with ecoregional and project-level approaches, global science and indicators serve to strengthen strategies, target resources, focus conservation actions, and increase conservation impact.

Visit Global Conservation Science.

Ecoregional Assessments

Ecoregional Assessments provide a vision of success for conserving the representative biodiversity of an ecoregion, and priorities for conservation action to achieve that vision.

The vision of success includes:

• The ecological systems, natural communities, and species that are representative of an ecoregion;
• Long-term goals for the abundance and distribution of these systems, communities, and species to ensure their persistence into the future; and
• The portfolio of conservation areas  that, if conserved, would achieve the long-term goals.

Priorities for conservation action include:

• Selected areas from within the portfolio that require immediate attention;
• Selected areas that contain significant proportions, or irreplaceable components, of regional and global biodiversity;
• The most critical threats to the ecological systems, natural communities and species; and 
• The strategic themes, opportunities, and key partnerships that have the greatest likelihood of achieving the goals and vision for conservation success.

An Ecoregional Assessment should be conducted when a region lacks a broad-scale biodiversity assessment that shows priorities for biodiversity conservation, or when new information has become available that calls for revisiting previously set priorities.

Get started on Ecoregional Assessments.

Conservation Action Planning

Conservation Action Planning allows you to execute a complete project cycle at any scale—including design, implementation and evaluation.

The guidance and tools on this site can help you:

• Identify the project’s biodiversity of interest and its current and desired status; 
• Identify the most critical threats currently or likely to degrade the biodiversity; 
• Recognize the social, economic, political and cultural factors contributing to the threats or representing opportunities to enhance the biodiversity;
• Develop strategies to abate the threats and maintain or restore the biodiversity based on the situation at hand; and,
• Implement the strategies, monitor the outcomes and use that information to adapt and learn throughout the life of the project.

Conservation Action Planning can be executed for any project at any scale. When regional priorities have been set, Conservation Action Planning is used to determine the plan of action for these priorities. As actions are taken and outcomes are measured, conservation action plans are revised to incorporate new knowledge.

Get started on Conservation Action Planning. 

Conservation Networks

Conservation Networks are groups of people, involved in some aspect of conservation, who collaborate to create and share know-how, usually related to a common set of specific conservation challenges.

Conservation Networks may be organized to:

• Develop planning/decision tools or methods, and field test them in multiple places;
• Develop, implement, and assess the results of, a particular strategy in multiple places;
• Accelerate effective adoption of a proven method or strategy across multiple places;
• Build capacity of practitioners to use a particular conservation method or strategy; and/or
• Provide for regular peer-review of conservation action.

Conservation Networks are most effective when organized to help members resolve a conservation challenge that is a high-priority to each member, and when they routinely capture and share lessons learned with the broader conservation community.

Learn to Organize a Conservation Network or find an Existing Conservation Network 

Special Topics

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Learn about existing Special Topics

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is an international, nonprofit organization that preserves plants, animals and natural communities representing the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive. Using the methods and tools of Conservation by Design, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 47 million hectares in Latin America, North America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific.

Visit us on the Web at nature.org for more information.