JRS Biodiversity Foundation

Field Museum of Natural History

Organization: Field Museum of Natural History

Project Location: Peru

Web Address: www.fieldmuseum.org

Title of Grant: “Index for Conservation Compatibility (ICC): A practical information management tool for monitoring and managing conservation landscapes”

Grant Amount: $200,000 over 3 years

Principal Investigator: Debra Moskovits

Organization Background:

The Field Museum was founded to house the biological and anthropological collections assembled for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. These objects form the core of the Museum's collections which have grown through world-wide expeditions, exchange, purchase, and gifts to more than twenty million specimens. The collections form the foundation of the Museum's exhibition, research and education programs, which are further informed by a world-class natural history library of more than 250,000 volumes. In addition, the Museum carries out numerous natural history projects throughout the world.

Grant Description:

This 3 year grant will enable the Museum to continue to refine a monitoring tool that it has developed for a landscape in central Peru, the Parque Nacional Cordillera Azul (PNCAZ) and its buffer zone. PNCAZ is the last remaining expanse of intact Andean foothills in Peru.
The Museum calls its conceptual structure the “Index for Conservation Compatibility” or ICC. The ICC now guides the Park’s management activities and measures its successes or failures, based on georeferenced information that is gathered in the field and synthesized immediately into maps. The ICC is a composite measure of cultural assets, quality of human life, threats to cultural and biological diversity, operational (on the ground) and institutional mechanisms, and biological diversity.

The Problem:

Motivation for designing strong ecological monitoring programs in the service of conservation may never have been higher than it is today. Yet too many monitoring programs continue to run aground before they start. Often the monitoring is so complex that it takes away much-needed resources (money, staff, time) from the execution of the program to be monitored. This problem is particularly acute in neotropical countries where sheer scale of biological richness, size of landscapes in need of protection, persistence of threats, diversity of stakeholders, and often limited funding make it difficult to integrate conservation efforts and to collect relevant data. And all too often analysis of collected data is too slow for the information to feed back into timely decision making and course-correction, which then defeats the purpose for monitoring.

Conceptual confusion is another universal impediment. Research, inventory, and monitoring are often thought of interchangeably. Yet, there is an enormous difference between knowing what is being protected (inventory), understanding the ecological processes and cause-effect links (research), and being able to track progress toward conservation goals (monitoring). This confusion, when intertwined with real-world challenges leads to a wide range of unproductive reactions, including an indiscriminate hunger for data, substitution of research and inventory for monitoring, scattershot approaches, the search for proxies, and the tendency to skip goal setting in favor of "high-tech" methods.

The Solution:

To address these issues, The Field Museum has been working to develop a conceptual structure that the Museum calls “Index for Conservation Compatibility” or ICC. The ICC is a composite, scaleable tool that defines a common set of quantifiable measurements around biological diversity, cultural assets, quality of human life, threats to cultural and biological diversity, and operational (on the ground) and institutional (government) mechanisms. These georeferenced measurements gathered in the field are synthesized immediately into maps that indicate success or failure and guide management activities. The advantage of the ICC approach—which sets it apart from other monitoring methods—is its focus on a unit of land (hectare-blocks). Each hectare is assigned a level of compatibility with conservation, according to defined parameters that can be adjusted to the conservation vision for different areas. These parameters integrate across the different activities that make up the full conservation effort.

Currently the Museum is piloting the ICC in partnership with Peruvian NGO CIMA (Centro para la Conservación, Investigación y Manejo de Áreas Naturales) in Cordillera Azul National Park – a remarkably rich, intact expanse of Andean foothills. With the support of the JRS Foundation the Museum will refine the ICC model, broaden its applicability, distill its knowledge into booklets produced by CIMA for use in Latin America, and create a bilingual website to share the ICC model with conservation practitioners worldwide.

Global Impact:

The ICC project focuses directly on enhancing “the preservation of biological diversity and environmental sustainability.” The research that has gone into developing a monitoring and planning tool that uses the best available information to guide effective management is already producing visible results in PNCAZ. Because of the successes in PNCAZ, the national system for protected areas in Peru (INRENA) is interested in adopting the ICC system for all of its protected areas in the country. The Field Museum has also have been asked by several conservation organizations in Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia to share the ICC methodology. The Museum is confident that continued improvement and dissemination of the ICC will allow it to achieve widespread use as an effective and cost-efficient management and planning tool.