By Jonathan Adams and Alan Holt

At a conservation science conference not so long ago, a leading researcher was describing his work on a particular bird species in a remote corner of the planet.

One of his listeners, another conservation scientist, asked about visiting the field site. "Absolutely not," was the brusque reply. "You can't visit my birds."

The bird researcher's motivation was reasonable, even admirable: protecting the integrity of the site for both research and ecological reasons. And yet his response was unsettling, embodying a major reason why conservation has been slow to take advantage of the information revolution: my birds.

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

Ecology, the foundation science of conservation, has long fostered a culture in which researchers own their data (and, by extension, even the organisms and systems those data reflect) to a degree almost unheard of in other sciences.

Ecologists frequently avoid sharing their data until they have mined every useful nugget…a process that can take decades.

Conservation science inherited that unfortunate ecological tradition, a problem magnified by the sheer scale and complexity of the conservation challenge. Conservation practitioners feel tremendous pressure to address the immediate problems they face rather than reflecting on those they have (they hope) already resolved.

That habit points to an even larger and more pernicious problem. Conservationists often do not communicate about their efforts except to trumpet their success to donors or potential donors. Such unreflective, uncritical communication does not identify good practices in conservation or help others learn from previous mistakes.

Without a culture that encourages innovation and experimentation, and that accepts the failures that must accompany those experiments, learning can never take place.

Sharing Knowledge Is the Key to Better Conservation

For all these reasons, the conservation community has a hard time marshalling collective knowledge. That must change.

Countless individuals and organizations now recognize how much more effective conservation could be if we took better advantage of the knowledge now often stashed away in the brains, file drawers, hard drives and scattered websites of practitioners around the world. If we all could access all that experience we could stop reinventing square wheels and instead use that knowledge to influence the actions of markets, industries, governments and others.

What does it take to turn this possibility into reality?

The tools are at hand. We can capture the knowledge effectively and use the power of the internet to turn this into a robust, living library. This means not just building larger and larger collections of information on the often forlorn hope that someone will find what they need, but creating ways of working and using technology that make conservation practitioners more effective every day.

Conservationists from around the world have come to a consensus on the principles for sharing information, embodied in the Conservation Commons. The Nature Conservancy endorses those principles and has made them tangible through efforts that make it easy for practitioners to share their knowledge and expertise, such as ConserveOnline and Conservation Projects Database, and two forthcoming efforts, NatureTube and the TNC Expertise Database.

Conservation needs radical changes in the way we conceive, enact, share and measure our actions, because success depends ultimately on identifying and then sharing what works as widely and quickly as possible. The necessary changes amount to a revolution because they require assaulting cultural, institutional, legal and disciplinary barricades — and in the process changing the ways individual conservationists work.

Then we can transform conservation into an endeavor that is both more collaborative and more rigorous, both accountable and inclusive. Most important, we can make bigger, faster conservation impacts.

(March 2009)

Photo credits (top to bottom, left to right): © Talking conservation in Chile (Mark Godfrey/TNC); courtesy of Jonathon Adams