Lessons Learned
With CEPF support, the Missouri Botanical Garden, in partnership with a regional network of plant experts in East Africa, sought to enable and encourage governments, donors and nongovernmental organizations to adopt plant conservation assessments based on reliable, verified data into more effective conservation planning and policy development.
Roy E. Gereau, Assistant Curator and Tanzania Program Director, Missouri Botanical Garden
What was the most important lesson learned?
Red List evaluation is a highly complex and time-intensive process requiring careful coordination between operational units; each of these units must be fully operational and appropriately linked with the others to assure that these efforts produce practical and long-lasting conservation results.
Describe how you learned this and whether / how you have adapted your approach or specific project elements as a result.
The operational units in the Red List evaluation process as conducted in this project are: collation of distributional data; mapping and calculation of assessment parameters; dissemination of data to evaluators; organization and coordination of workshops and other evaluation meetings; continuing capacity-building of evaluators in Red List procedures; timely communication of evaluations to IUCN for publication on Red List; and delivery of Red List analyses and evaluations to end users for incorporation into conservation planning.
Implementation partners in the project -- IUCN (Global Species Programme, Eastern African Regional Office, Tanzania Country Office), National Herbarium of Tanzania, East African Herbarium (National Museums of Kenya), Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden (Florida, U.S.A.) -- were well chosen and worked effectively together to achieve project goals. Some goals were however overly ambitious, especially the number of species to be evaluated; rather than the 1,743 species initially planned for evaluation, complete evaluation of 800-900 species within the three-year time period would have been a more realistic goal. Resources were not always appropriately allocated among the various project activities; due in part to unpredictable changes in prices, travel, specimen shipment, and telecommunications required more funds than originally planned, whereas major equipment and external professional services were less costly than anticipated. Mid-project re-allocation of resources among project components helped to resolve most of these difficulties.
Development of efficient protocols for specimen data basing early in the project facilitated rapid collation of a very large dataset. Some formatting problems with preliminary downloads slowed initial GIS analysis for Red List assessments, but were resolved following the First Red Listing Workshop. The resulting, standardized format remains in use for continuing plant Red List assessments throughout East Africa.
Inevitably, some of the project’s highly ambitious goals remain incompletely realized. Data collation and mapping of remaining species is well advanced and will be completed without additional external funding. Limited additional funding will be needed to support meetings of the Eastern African Plant Red Listing Authority and associates to complete remaining evaluations and deliver results to the IUCN Species Survival Commission for publication on the Red List.
- December 5, 2008
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