Ecologists and conservation professionals often place a high value on education and outreach activities that are intended to communicate information about conservation topics, projects and programs to a broader audience.  Such activities feature prominently in many environmental management strategies, including the recently-developed U. S. State Wildlife Action Plans.  Substantial resources have been and continue to be invested by conservation organizations and government agencies in education and outreach.  With these resources, however, come increased demands for accountability and a general interest in finding ways to link these activities more directly to ecological outcomes.

There has been considerable interest in recent decades in development and testing of approaches for evaluating the effectiveness of conservation activities.  However, most of these methods have focused on management activities that attempt to directly manipulate species or key ecosystem processes.  And although techniques are available from the social sciences for evaluating educational programs, these methods have not been explicitly designed to incorporate information on ecological outcomes.  

As part of a larger project examining performance measurement strategies for the U. S. State Wildlife Action Plans, we used expert panels and literature review to investigate five potential approaches for linking outreach and education activities with ecological outcomes.

Results/Conclusions

This project has identified a suite of tools that can be used to develop management indicators, including ecological outcome measures, for conservation education and outreach projects.  One particularly appropriate tool for this context is a logic chain or results chain, which uses a sequence of logical intermediates to link activities, intermediate outputs, and desired longer-term outcomes (including ecological outcomes).  We have found that logic chains provide two immediate benefits to practitioners: first, the process of constructing the chain identifies major assumptions about how and why an activity will achieve its desired effects; and second, logic chains can help facilitate the identification of management indicators, including proxy indicators in situations where ultimate outcomes cannot be measured immediately.  We illustrate the use of these chains using real-world examples, including presentations to civic organizations and outreach to local landowners who may wish to donate conservation easements.  Finally, we describe qualitative and quantitative methods for testing logic chains, including methods for assessing the robustness of each logical step in the chain, modeling approaches that construct and assess alternate pathways of change, congruence tests with causal pathways described in the literature, and analyses of data from management indicators.