Living Landscapes Program Tools

The Living Landscapes Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society is designed to develop better ways for people and wildlife to share the same living landscapes, by setting priorities for conservation through the eyes of wildlife and beyond protected area boundaries.

The first tool that the Living Landscapes Program developed was the Landscape Species Approach. The approach is focused on planning conservation to address the environmental needs of, and human threats to viable populations of a suite of landscape species. By doing so, not only will landscape species and the habitats they require survive over the long-term, so to will the assemblage of other plant and animal species sheltered under their ecological umbrellas.

Click here for a PDF article about the landscape species approach.

Click on these links for a copy of the Landscape Species Selection Software and installation instructions (Species Selection V.2, Species Selection V2 Installation README, Species Selection Examples)

As the Living Landscapes Program team analyzed the process of strategic planning at a landscape scale, several other tools were considered necessary to directing conservation investments.

Conceptual Models: All conservation project leaders have an implicit, mental image of what they are conserving and how.  This mental image is not always communicated to project members, donors, stakeholders or colleagues. The Living Landscapes Program devised a simple tool to build a conceptual model that captures a team’s goal, conservation targets, threats to those targets and interventions planned to abate the threats.  These conceptual models help build teamwork and refine project conceptualization.  They also help to communicate how and why we act, what we are trying to conserve in the near future and how it relates to our long-term goals.

Click here to download a Powerpoint document on how to build conceptual models

Landscape-scale conservation implies work over huge areas and addressing threats with a broad scope. The resources available to conservation and the staff of conservation teams rarely keep pace with the larger scale of action needed to conserve entire landscapes. Therefore we must plan and implement conservation more efficiently and more strategically. Efficient conservation often requires rapid response to the most important threats with less-than-perfect information. Strategic conservation of entire landscapes often requires the involvement of many partners to multiply our impacts. The Living Landscapes Program developed a simple tool for assessment of human activities as the first step in efficient and strategic conservation. Our method is participatory and places stakeholders in the position of experts contributing their perceptions of human activities that threaten biodiversity and sustainable natural resource use. Participants identify, prioritize, describe and map threats in a way that imparts ownership of the results and subsequent actions. This helps recruit partners and promotes political acceptance of action to abate threats.

Check back here for a PDF document about participatory assessments of human activity.

In addition, a recent article by Treves et. al in Human Dimentions of Wildlife 11(1) entitled "A simple, cost-effective method for involving stakeholders in spatial assessment of threats to biodiversity" highlights the use of this tool at various sites.

The Living Landscapes Program has an ambitious plan for the development of subsequent tools for site-based conservation. We anticipate completion of the following tools and technical manuals:

1. Monitoring frameworks: Simple schematic plans of target states, trend data, activities, and indicators to help a conservation team to assess its performance, track threat levels and monitor conservation targets. These frameworks will link directly to conceptual models and facilitate the evaluation of project outcomes.

2. Setting priorities for interventions: Simple guidelines and schematics that can help a conservation team to assess ongoing interventions, reorient their own activities and strategically identify gaps in interventions. This tool will link directly to conceptual models and help teams to weigh costs and benefits of the many activities they must consider when conserving at a landscape scale.

3. Selecting focal species: A focus on wildlife can help in project conceptualization, planning, implementation and monitoring. One can select wildlife with an emphasis on stakeholder participation, scientific rigor, or any number of site-specific criteria, so this tool will offer practitioners a menu of options and guidelines for selection criteria to facilitate a strategic and efficient focus on wildlife.

4. Building biological landscapes: When using focal species approaches, it is often helpful to map the habitat and space needs of your focal species’ populations to facilitate the identification of key places and overlap in human and wildlife activities. This manual provides simple methods and guidelines to assist in the construction of habitat suitability models, futures models and human activity models.

5. Project evaluations: Conservation teams often enjoy a chance to brainstorm with visiting colleagues. To assess and strengthen field projects, the Living Landscapes Program is developing a standardized tool for project evaluations in which visiting practitioners immerse themselves in the daily activities and long-range plans of the host, field team in a collegial and non-threatening dialogue aimed at improving implementation and monitoring. This type of on-site visit can strengthen field teams by providing advice, connecting them to networks of experts on specific topics, or provide a wider perspective on the challenges faced by a team. Such visits often teach the visitors as well and provide headquarters with objective evaluations of strengths and weaknesses along with specific recommendations for improvements. The planned manual chapter provides guidelines to standardize project evaluations and avoid the potential for intimidating field staff with heavy-handed job performance evaluations.