Building Robust Long-Term Conservation Monitoring With Design Thinking

This article reports on an on-going project that aims to develop a long-term (i.e., over 30 years) conservation monitoring plan for rare mesocarnivores on lands managed by the US Forest Service in the western US. The project employs a design thinking approach, which is relatively unknown in natural resource management, for the development of the monitoring plan. We report on our design process through the first three phases (empathize, define, and ideate), followed by a brief description of our current effort on prototyping. The early phases of the design process reveals that two touchpoints would present unique challenges in successfully implementing our plan: (1) instructions for data collection communicated through protocols and (2) the use of monitoring information for predictive decisions. Standardized template for protocols and decision support tools to address these challenges are suggested as potential solutions. A component content management approach is also suggested as a way to create a long-term monitoring that can be adaptive to changes in information over the time period that long-term monitoring is designed to cover. We conclude by postulating that the design thinking approach may be applicable to other natural resource management projects.