Download Technical Manuals

WCS-International saves wildlife and wildlands by understanding and resolving critical problems that threaten key species and large, wild ecosystems around the world. Simply put, our field staff make decisions about what causes the needs of wildlife and of people to clash and take action with their partners to avoid or mitigate these conflicts that threaten wildlife and their habitat. Helping our field staff to make the best decisions is a core objective of the Living Landscapes Program.

We believe that if conservation projects are to be truly effective, we must: (1) be explicit about what we want to conserve, (2) identify the most important threats and where they occur within the landscape, (3) strategically plan our interventions such that we are confident that they will help abate the most critical threats, and (4) put in place a process for measuring the effectiveness of our conservation actions, and using this information to guide our decisions. The Living Landscapes Program is developing and testing, with our field programs, a set of decision support tools designed to help field staff: select targets, map key threats, prepare a conservation strategy, and develop a monitoring framework.

The application of these tools is described in a series of brief technical manuals. These how-to guides are designed to provide clear and practical instructions. If after using the manual to run a strategic planning exercise you have any suggestions as to how we might improve the instructions please let us know.

Wilkie, D. and the Living Landscapes Program. 2004. Participatory spatial assessment of human activities—a tool for conservation planning. Technical Manual 1, Wildlife Conservation Society, Living Landscapes Program, Bronx, NY.

Wilkie, D. and the Living Landscapes Program. 2004. Creating Conceptual Models—a tool for thinking strategically. Technical Manual 2, Wildlife Conservation Society, Living Landscapes Program, Bronx, NY.

Wilkie, D. and the Living Landscapes Program. 2006. Measuring our effectiveness—a framework for monitoring. Technical Manual 3, Wildlife Conservation Society, Living Landscapes Program, Bronx, NY.

Wilkie, D. and the Living Landscapes Program. 2006. Household surveys—a tool for conservation design, action and monitoring. Technical Manual 4, Wildlife Conservation Society, Living Landscapes Program, Bronx, NY.

Strindberg, S., K. Didier, and the Living Landscapes Program. 2006. A quick reference guide to the Landscape Species Selection Software, version 2.1. Technical Manual 5, Wildlife Conservation Society, Living Landscapes Program, Bronx, NY.

Didier, K. and the Living Landscape Program. 2006. Building Biological and Threats Landscapes from ecological first principles, a step-by-step approach. Technical Manual 6, Wildlife Conservation Society, Living Landscapes Program, Bronx, NY.

Didier, K. and the Living Landscape Program. 2008. Building Conservation Landscapes- mapping the possible impact of your conservation actions. Technical Manual 7, Wildlife Conservation Society, Living Landscapes Program, Bronx, NY.

Click on the links above to download PDF versions of any Technical Manuals that interest you. Please share these manuals with your co-workers and colleagues. If you would like to receive printed copies of any of our publications, please contact LLP@wcs.org. (Spanish and French-language versions can be downloaded by following the links in the left column).