In the previous post, Mouse-based Monitoring, methods for evaluating the effectiveness of large environmental organizations were discussed. Smaller scale efforts have the same kinds of problems but don't have support organizations that could be reformed to provide better systems. They are too small to use such methods but there are a lot of them so that their aggregate efforts are large and seemingly unmanageable.

A poignant example of this was documented a few years ago in an article in Whole Earth Magazine, Nice Boulders, but Where's the Fish?. It's an account by Seth Zuckerman of the efforts of local environmental interventions to restore streams and fisheries.

These spawner surveys have become an annual ritual for two dozen or so residents of the Mattole watershed on California's North Coast, where citizens have worked to revive faltering salmon runs since 1979. A spiderwork of nonprofit groups has arisen to learn more about the fish and their habitat, to communicate to our neighbors what we learn, and to do what we can to help the fish. Some projects have been volunteer efforts, with others funded by foundations, the state or federal government, or commercial salmon-fishing license fees.

My experiences surveying the spawning grounds made me wonder: after two decades of work, why is the sight of a single salmon so noteworthy? We've dragged boulders and logs into creeks to create better habitat for young fish, replaced culverts to make it easier for spawners to get upstream, decommissioned dirt roads that were fouling fishes' homes with sediment, and raised native salmon eggs in homemade redwood troughs.

The article recounts many efforts by small groups who took pride in what they saw as restoration of Salmon runs, but few had any fish to show for their efforts, a touchy subject they were reluctant to discuss and excused in various ways. Few were willing to engage in measurement and fewer focused on these telling measures, preferring to highlight peripheral issues such as erosion control and visual improvement. But nature is messy, not neat.

In 1982, a debris torrent poured off a clear-cut, carrying huge trees from the downstream, uncut forest. When this stew of logs and mud reached the creek, it dammed the stream and created such a mess that the landowner was fined $5,000. The incident became a poster child of bad logging. But biologist Charley Dewberry found the next summer that young coho were most plentiful in the pool behind the logjam. The debris flow had created a mock beaver pond.

An article in Conservation In Practice, Evidence-based Conservation, spotlights this issue and offers some suggestions.

At the University of East Anglia, in the U.K., we have been carrying out a series of research projects to determine the consequences of various management practices and it is striking that repeatedly the conventional dogma turns out to be mistaken. For example, it is widely accepted that burning reed beds (a traditional practice disliked by many conservationists) kills many soil invertebrates, but a series of replicated, randomized and controlled experiments showed that this was not true; but flooding (a standard practice approved of by most conservationists) did kill them (10, 11). As a second example, a U.K. government conservation scheme paid farmers to flood fields in winter to enhance populations of breeding waders, but the flooding actually kills the earthworms on which the waders feed (12). The waders are largely dependent upon shallow pools in summer but with the government scheme all areas receiving subsidies must be dry by the spring. As a final example, it was thought that the low survival of wader chicks on saline lagoons was largely due to a decline in fertility and predation was a major problem. Research showed that fertility has little effect, the major problem is chicks starving due to high salinities killing the invertebrates (13).

A key problem noted in the article is that conservationists are not communicating with one another, not sharing methods and results so that they can learn and improve. There is a reluctance to take time away from field work to document activities. But this is short sighted since efforts are duplicated and progress is slowed.

If each had an account of everyone else’s methods, successes, and failures, and those of wardens in other countries, then surely conservation would be progressing at a more rapid pace. The Internet provides the ideal medium for this.

One problem is that conservationists have too much to do already and documenting responses to management is yet another boring administrative task. ... I believe conservationists need to find ways of assimilating their collective experiences. Rather than waste time, the opportunity to learn from others and avoid repeating mistakes should actually provide more time for conservation that works.

The value may be obvious to you, here you are reading some obscure blog, but it's still rare for actual working environmentalists to engage in networked communication with one another using the internet. There's plenty of environmental opinion and political advocacy, and abundant if difficult to access academic work, but practical information about field techniques and results is sparse. There is also a reluctance to engage in critical thinking. Too often discussions are myopic exercises in futility conducted in echo chambers of received opinion. Environmental practice is politicized at every level, a situation that has existed for a long time and has created a charged atmosphere hostile to dissent and innovation. As in many other fields - from journalism to academia - practitioners self-select for comfort in this sort of working environment which diminishes diversity further. Worse, innovators are reluctant to speak, preferring to work alone in peace.

Perhaps the smattering of articles that expose slow progress and propose methods to gather and share evidence will result over time in a new type of conservation that actually works.