As climate change progresses and stressors to biodiversity continue to expand across the landscape, conservation actions need to be increasingly targeted and effective. Past and current efforts put more weight on investments in conservation application with less attention to monitoring the outcome and refining the approach. The inception of the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives provided a timely opportunity to refine our approach to conservation in a way that maximizes return on investment to maintain important natural resources and ecosystems for future generations. The conservation community lags behind other sectors in evaluating the efficacy of their actions. For example, the concept of “business excellence” has been around for decades (Black and Groombridge 2010) - an approach that moves businesses toward success. In public health, statistical assessments of monitoring data often lead to breakthroughs in streamlining disease prevention. Within the conservation community, some organizations and agencies have begun to adopt strategies from other sectors, such as scenario planning and structured decision making, to help identify effective strategies. Similarly, the Nature Conservancy has begun to adapt performance measures intended for smaller scales to “whole systems” (Ward et al. 2011). This project proposed to develop a suite of performance measures that would allow the LCCs to track progress and efficacy in a rigorous, meaningful, and innovative manner. Investigators proposed to find case studies on performance measures and look more deeply at a subset of those that were most promising to learn their strengths and weaknesses. The investigation extended to such sectors as public health, education, business, policy, and natural resources. Investigators planned to summarize their findings and present them to the LCC Performance Measures Working Group and walk group members through a decision making process that would result in the identification of a model and specific performance measures for the LCCs that would be practical, realistic, effective, and innovative. Once they had worked with the working group to develop a suite of performance measures that would be applicable across the 22 LCCs, investigators proposed to make a training module available online for managers to use. They also proposed an in-person training for LCC leaders and partners and intended to produce written materials for managers and also a scientific publication about the process.
