ASU team creates decision-making framework to improve conservation efficiency
An ASU team worked in partnership with a spiny lobster fishery in the Galápagos Marine Reserve in Ecuador to develop a decision-making framework to help make conservation more efficient. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Conserving the world’s ecosystems is a hard job — especially in times of climate change, large-scale landscape destruction and the sixth mass extinction. The job’s not made any easier by the fact that conservation as a field is chronically underfunded, leaving teams of conservationists without enough money or people to accomplish all that they want to.
Camila Guerrero Pineda, a recent graduate of Arizona State University's PhD in biology and society program, argues that it’s important for conservationists to assess how they spend their resources to maximize conservation benefits. But, knowing that such a task is the last thing on conservationists’ to-do lists, she went ahead and came up with a decision-making system herself. She recently published an article discussing the details of her system and methods of developing it in Conservation Science and Practice.
“The biggest issue with conservation is lack of money and lack of efficiency with using that money. So first, you don't have enough money, and second, when you have the money, you could use it better: You could get more done with the little money you have," she explained. "And this seemed like a good project for me to start working on.”
Guerrero Pineda developed her data-management system in partnership with a spiny lobster fishery in the Galápagos Marine Reserve in Ecuador. That work was conducted with ASU's Center for Biodiversity Outcomes as part of a larger project funded by the Lenfest Ocean Program.
Her data-management system helped pair the fishery’s records of how much they spent on different conservation interventions with data on how effective those interventions were. The system, which Guerrero Pineda made as an Excel workbook to keep it accessible for conservation managers, also included guidance for the users on how to incorporate data in the workbook, helping conservation managers organize their data, and synthesize the results of their expenditures to inform future decision-making.
“We asked conservation managers (in the Galápagos) about what a good case study would be for them, and they said the lobsters are a very important species for them,” Guerrero Pineda said. “They also had a lot of data on the lobsters but weren’t really using that data to its full potential.”
Paola Sangolqui, a PhD candidate in the Biology and Society PhD program who also works as the marine conservation coordinator for the organization Jocotoco, served as the on-the-ground contact between Guerrero Pineda and the fishermen. Having grown up in the Galápagos, Sangolqui helped organize meetings around how to use the data-management system, collect local managers’ feedback and validate that the system worked how it was supposed to.
“It’s always important to include local people in research contexts, someone that local stakeholders can relate to,” Sangolqui said. “It fosters trust, ensures that the research is more relevant and applicable, and strengthens local capacity.”
Sangolqui explains that the conservation metric the ASU team developed is especially important for a place like the Galápagos, which has a huge suite of unique biodiversity, attracting lots of international research attention.
“Local managers can’t always keep up with the sheer volume of information coming from scientific studies done in the Galápagos. So this project was crucial in providing a ‘diagnosis’ of the current situation — identifying key gaps and challenges in linking scientific research with management decisions.”
Through using the data-management tool, Guerrero Pineda's team was able to identify main threats to spiny lobsters in the marine reserve, like a local unsustainable fishery, as well as where most of the lobster conservation program’s money was going, which was largely to employing researchers to monitor the lobster populations. The framework allowed the team to suggest that the fishery could cut down on monitoring costs to spend more resources on improving other conservation interventions, like increasing local compliance with conservation laws.
Guerrero Pineda believes the data-management system can help ease the burdens on conservation managers across the world and increase efficiency of conservation in the process.
“I don’t want this work to be forgotten in the academic literature. Our goal was to make conservation managers’ lives easier," she said. "We tried to make this tool generic enough so anyone can use it. So hopefully we achieve that.”
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