Title
WCS Working Paper No. 42 - Using systematic monitoring to evaluate and adapt management of a tiger reserve in northern LAO PDR
Author(s)
Arlyne Johnson, Chanthavy Vongkhamheng, Santi Saypanya, Troy Hansel, Samantha Strindberg
Published
2013
Abstract
Although considerable effort and resources have been dedicated to biodiver¬sity conservation over the last three decades, the effectiveness of these conserva¬tion actions is still frequently unclear. Thus, practitioners are being called on to be ever more strategic in their use of often limited resources available for the scale of the work required. To address this problem, several frameworks have been developed to guide the practice of conservation and facilitate adaptive manage¬ment. Although these frameworks now exist and monitoring is key to adaptive management, there are still relatively few detailed examples of projects that have successfully implemented monitoring plans and then analyzed the data to gener¬ate results that were in turn used to adapt management. Reasons cited for this include insufficient funding for monitoring and evaluation, inappropriate monitor¬ing designs that are unable to generate results to answer management questions, ineffectively managed monitoring information, and institutional arrangements that do not facilitate the feedback of monitoring results (should they exist) to man¬agement. Given these challenges, there is a need for case studies that illustrate how monitoring and evaluation can be done in the context of the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation to support learning and provide evidence for the effectiveness of a conservation action. This paper provides a detailed case study of adaptive management in practice. In this case the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Landscape Species Approach was used over a seven-year period to plan, execute, evaluate and adapt a project to recover wild tigers Panthera tigris and their ungu¬late prey (Gaur Bos gaurus, Southwest China serow Capricornis milneedwardsii, Sambar deer Cervus unicolor, wild pig Sus spp., and muntjacs Muntiacus spp.) in Lao PDR. After several iterations of the project management cycle, we assess to what degree the framework supported rigorous monitoring and evaluation that was used to inform and adapt management and what conditions were present and/or needed to overcome the constraints that commonly impede the practice of adaptive management in conservation.
Keywords
species monitoring, tigers
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