Meet the Conservation Methods and Learning Team

Our role is to develop, harvest, and provide learning and training opportunities on conservation methods for the purpose of improving the practice of conservation within the Conservancy and beyond. Through the tools and services we provide, we hope to infuse the principles and practices of sound conservation throughout the Conservancy’s core work and priorities.

Our tools and services are created in collaboration with field programs and managers to:

• Set conservation priorities and develop effective strategies through regional assessments and conservation action planning (CAP)
• Evaluate strategy effectiveness at multiple scales
• Improve cross-project learning through online resources, peer review workshops, fellowships and conservation network support.
• Improve access to conservation expertise, knowledge and support needed to deliver consistently sound conservation throughout the organization.
• Orient new employees and non-scientists alike to the science and practice of conservation within the Conservancy.

We accomplish these goals by facilitating workshops on organization-wide initiatives and targeting specific field program needs, creating networking opportunities and exchanges, providing training and useful online resources, leveraging the Conservancy’s advances through publications and working papers, and maintaining dynamic collaborations with our field programs and academic, agency and NGO partners.

News You Can Use

• TheConservation by Design Gateway provides one-stop access to TNC’s resources, tools and stories from the field, leveraging our conservation innovations.  View the April 2009 business plan for the expansion of the Gateway.
• The 2009 Measures Summit brought together 23 of the Conservancy’s highest priority projects and measures pilot projects from 11 countries across 5 continents to share successes.  Browse the many products we are generating from the Summit.
• A new working paper provides valuable guidance on investing appropriately in monitoring strategy effectiveness.
• The 2009 Climate Clinic yielded 20 climate adapted projects from around the Conservancy, new CAP climate change adaptation guidance, and many more resources for ongoing learning about climate adaption.
• Miradi is new user-friendly software that facilitates sound conservation planning and adaptive management. Following its public release in April 2008, more than 2000 practitioners worldwide (including more than 500 TNC staff) from 200 countries worldwide have started using Miradi.
• Learn from more than 1000 conservation projects or leverage your work through ConPro, the Conservancy’s conservation project database, now with public access.

Our 2010 Priorities

• Re-design the Conservation Gateway
• Add a “virtual science” component to the New Employee Orientation, and Science Orientation workshops
• Establish a senior managers measures team to revise the Measures Business Plan
• Lead training courses and technical guidance on monitoring strategy effectiveness
• Create 50 new staff fellowships through the Coda Global Fellows Programs
• Implement new CAP coach training
• Launch a new Conservation Coaches network
• Produce 3 Climate Adaptation guidance documents: a Climate Adaptation Primer, CAP guidance, ecoregional planning guidance
• Make improvements to ConPro and Miradi to better support developing and reporting on strategy effectiveness measures

Meet the people behind the success!