A Management-Strategy Toolbox to Facilitate Collaborative Conservation, Adaptation, and Sharing of Lessons Learned
 
Amanda Webb1*, Matthew Grabau2, Genevieve Johnson3, Megan Friggens4
 
1University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA; adwebb@email.arizona.edu
2US Fish and Wildlife Service, Tucson, Arizona, USA; matthew_grabau@fws.gov
3US Bureau of Reclamation, Boulder City, Nevada, USA; gjohnson@usbr.gov  
4Rocky Mountain Research Station/US FS, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA; meganfriggens@fs.fed.us
 
A common issue identified by restoration practitioners and the larger conservation community is the difficulty in sharing lessons learned from both successful and unsuccessful resource management actions across large geographies and jurisdictions. Consequently, resource managers are losing valuable knowledge gained during implementation, especially for projects that face similar obstacles or use similar methodologies. In order to promote learning and project efficiencies, the US Bureau of Reclamation, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and US Forest Service are addressing this need by creating a user-friendly web portal to catalog and synthesize lessons-learned from on-the-ground actions, partnership and collaboration activities, monitoring, and adaptive management strategies intended to achieve conservation goals. The Collaborative Conservation and Adaptation Strategy Toolbox helps organize lessons learned from restoration and conservation activities according to landscape-scale stressors, specific resources, geographies, and methodologies. Partners developed a standard approach and template for capturing this information in case studies so that future managers can benefit from successful methodologies and protocols, as well as avoid possible pitfalls. Future steps for the Toolbox include synthesizing case study information for common topics to further help connect managers to information they need. Lastly, this Toolbox stores information in an easily accessible format for future sharing and dissemination. Through collaborative partnerships, we seek to broadly disseminate and communicate key information from managers implementing on-the-ground actions to leverage conservation knowledge and limited resources.