Tag Archive for: conservation

Setting the New Standard: Aligning Conservation Goals with Existing Priorities

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This is the seventh in a series of monthly blog posts exploring the development of a new standard in corporate conservation certification.

Last month’s blog post reflected how the world of conservation is awash in theories and stances on what is credible or not. It is also awash in objectives, priorities, plans and approaches. Every entity engaged with nature has a plan with a set of priorities, whether national or regional. Every state and territory in the U.S. has a State Wildlife Action Plan –  a blueprint for securing biodiversity in the future. The EU has a biodiversity strategy for 2020, as do many countries, including Australia, Japan and Kenya. Across the NGO landscape, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) promotes its priority conservation areas, IUCN frames its work around its Red List, and BirdLife International has its Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas. At a more local scale, biodiversity and the ecological health of watersheds, estuaries, sites of significant interest and other natural areas are all addressed with suites of priorities, many supported by science and most with attendant actions.  Many such plans have significant overlap, though none are universally adopted.

These plans highlight priorities, set targets and describe best practices towards meeting conservation goals. The most basic plans are informative only, while the best provide metrics, a clear picture of the desired end state, and a road map for implementation.

When Wildlife Habitat Council embarked on the re-design of its signature certification program and developed the soon-to-be-launched Conservation Certification, it took a different approach to ensure that the participants in its programs were implementing projects that met global conservation goals. Instead of creating more plans and priorities, it chose to align with existing plans and incentivize its participants to create explicit associations with them. We aligned with the wheel without reinventing it.

For WHC this approach makes a lot of sense for a variety of reasons.

WHC’s applicants – both members and not – are not conveniently located in a single conservation landscape. They cannot jointly adopt an initiative to recover a specific species, restore a regionally important ecosystem, or even focus on a single biome. To overlay a conservation priority that would have meaning for all possible locations would require that the priority be so general as to be meaningless. Instead, by aligning with existing priorities, WHC’s projects become part of the mosaic of efforts being done to advance landscape-scale conservation across the globe.

Also, having worked at the intersection of nature and business for almost three decades, WHC knows that a corporate conservation goal will only be achieved if the implementation on the ground has local meaning and significance. A narrow and specific goal that brooks no localization and allows for no real innovation will have no ownership and no longevity.  Some of the strongest projects we recognize have deep meaning in their communities. By incentivizing alignments with regionally-appropriate conservation plans, WHC provides for the freedom for practitioners to find goals and priorities that are important to them, thus increasing the likelihood of success both in the near and long terms.

An additional benefit of alignments is the increase in the importance of partnerships. WHC has always valued partnerships with conservation groups that invest in on-the-ground work. By encouraging alignments with these same groups’ priorities, we increase the likelihood of successful, goal-focused partnerships.

Finally, one of the principles we adopted as we designed our new Conservation Certification was accessibility to allow projects of all shapes and sizes to receive recognition and to encourage building of successful projects. By eschewing the development of our own conservation priorities, we secure accessibility for our participants and double down on our mantra that every act of conservation matters.   This approach has been designed into Conservation Certification, and an applicant will be steered towards aligning their efforts from the design phase through project maintenance and monitoring.

Under WHC’s new Conservation Certification, a program being submitted for recognition must meet a number of mandatory requirements, as follows:

  1. Have a stated conservation or education objective
  2. Provide value or benefit to the natural community
  3. Have measured outcomes supported by documentation
  4. Exceed any pertinent regulatory requirements
  5. Be locally appropriate

These criteria introduce the concept of alignments with other conservation plans, as project owners will have to determine what is ecologically appropriate for the location and what objective would be meaningful within that context.  A national conservation strategy, like the President Obama’s Pollinator Health Task Force, will provide a certain level of alignment on a broad scale, while a more local plan will be more specific with direct references to locations, partners and even plant lists. We encourage our participants to seek out the plans that are meaningful to them.

Once the criteria have been met, the applicant will be asked, for each project, to state what initiative they are aligning their goals to and how their actions are supporting them. Incentives, in the form of higher points, will be given to projects designed with explicit alignments and executed to secure them.

By not developing our own priorities but instead aligning with existing ones and leveraging existing efforts, WHC is being efficient in its approach and true to its mission and values.

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Soils in All the Colors of the Rainbow

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A rainbow of soil is under our feet; red as a barn and black as a peat. It’s yellow as lemon and white as the snow; bluish gray. So many colors below. Hidden in darkness as thick as the night; the only rainbow that can form without light. Dig you a pit, or bore you a hole, you’ll find enough colors to well rest your soil.
– A Rainbow of Soil Words by F.D. Hole, 1985

In my introductory post about the Year of Soils, I explained how soils are made up of numerous components, both organic and inorganic. But no two soils are created equal!

Soils vary widely around the world. They can be organized, or classified, based on the variations in these organic and inorganic components. There are a number of different classification systems, including the USDA’s Soil Taxonomy system and the FAO’s World Reference Base for Soil Resources. These systems organize soils based on considerations like their overall texture (the proportions of clay, silt, and sand, which form from the slow breakdown of bedrock), their mineral composition, and the thickness and composition of their layers.

Oh yes…layers! Soil isn’t the same all the way down–it is much more complex! Over time, it goes through complicated processes like leaching, the addition and breakdown of organic matter (humus), and the breakdown of bedrock. The result is these layers:

Regional variations in temperature, rainfall, etc., as well as the composition of the underlying bedrock, result in dramatic differences in these layers. Including their colors! Here in Maryland, for example, much of our soil is a bright orange-red near the surface, due to a type of clay that holds large amounts of iron. This iron oxidizes (rusts) in the presence of oxygen, resulting in this vivid color.

And just as the living soil ecosystem can influence the plant ecosystem growing above, these non-living characteristics have an impact as well. Different plants prefer different soil conditions, including depth, moisture/drainage, pH, and texture, which is one of the reasons why all of the different soil types around the world support such variable plant communities.

Soil testing can be a great way to learn about your soil’s classification and associated characteristics. You can use this information to figure out what kinds of plants will grow best on your land, and if any amendments are needed to improve growing conditions.

Have you ever had your soil tested? What did you learn about your soil?

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Get Outdoors this Spring with Citizen Science!

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Now that it’s finally spring and things are warming up and beginning to grow, it’s a great time to get your employees and your local community engaged in outdoor activities as part of your corporate conservation program. One great way to do this is by participating in a citizen science project.

Citizen science is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by non-scientific professionals. Citizen science projects are designed to be user-friendly for amateurs, and typically involve training to ensure everyone participating is comfortable with the techniques needed for surveys.

Here’s just a few examples of fantastic citizen science projects in North America that your team could participate in this spring and summer. There are many other great projects out there, of course, some of which (like Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count) are even conducted during the winter.

  1. NestWatch
  2. FrogWatch USA
  3. Nature’s Notebook
  4. NABA Butterfly Count Circles
  5. Project BudBurst
  6. NatureWatch (Canada)

For those of you with corporate conservation programs located outside of North America, here’s a couple of great citizen science programs that are conducted worldwide:

  1. eBird
  2. Project Noah
  3. iNaturalist
  4. Herp Mapper
  5. SPLASSH

Do you participate in any citizen science projects? Tell us about it in the comments below!

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Celebrate World Wetlands Day on February 2

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February 2 of each year is World Wetlands Day, which marks the date that the Convention on Wetlands (also known informally as the Ramsar Convention) was signed in 1971. World Wetlands Day provides private and public entities alike with the opportunity to raise awareness about the importance and value of wetlands.

Wetlands provide vital habitat to a number of species, including (but certainly not limited to) waterfowl, wading birds, frogs and salamanders, aquatic invertebrates, turtles, and fish. They also provide a number of essential ecosystem services like purifying our water, absorbing flood waters, and protecting coastal and riparian areas against erosion. Unfortunately, 64% of the world’s wetlands have been lost since 1900.

Voluntary efforts to manage wetlands and wetland-dependent species on corporate lands are invaluable for wetland conservation efforts, as well as in promoting wetland conservation within local communities. From vernal pool and wetland construction, to frog call surveys, to structural enhancements, WHC-certified programs around the world incorporate a wide range of conservation and education tools to further wetland conservation.

World Wetlands Day provides an opportunity to highlight the wetlands conservation work your program is already doing and raise awareness about the value of wetlands in your local community. There are numerous ways to celebrate World Wetlands Day at your site, even if your facility doesn’t have wetlands. The local community could be invited to help install native wetland plantings or artificial habitat structures for wetland species, or to participate in monitoring wetland birds or water quality. Even if you don’t have a wetland on site, you could use curricula like Project WET to educate young learners about wetland-related topics.

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Designing the Ideal Project at Ricoh Group’s West Caldwell Site

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When Yoko Perez started working for the Environmental Team at Ricoh Americas Corporation’s West Caldwell Office in June 2013, she started working to align their Wildlife at Work program with the priorities of Ricoh Group’s biodiversity policy, as well as to better engage employees in the program. She and her team recognized that working with WHC offers the Ricoh Americas branch a unique approach from Ricoh Group’s other branches to aligning with the company’s biodiversity policy.

The West Caldwell Office’s program includes five pollinator gardens, which were installed last November with the help of the site’s landscapers to pick the garden locations and 20 volunteers to plant the garden. The Environmental Team chose plant species such as lupine, bee balm, Joe-pye-weed, and black-eyed Susan that would be shade tolerant and provide nectar to pollinators. A small rain garden planted with pollinator-friendly species was also planted in an area near the building that tends to collect water.

In addition, invasive species such as multiflora rose, Japanese knotweed, phragmites, autumn olive, and Bradford pear have been observed on the property, so the Environmental Team is looking into controlling these species with the help of employees and local partner organizations.

Yoko and her team work hard to monitor and document their projects, including information on where each species was planted in the gardens and which of those plants survived. Monitoring is a critical part of every project because it provides information about what worked and what didn’t work.

Employees at the West Caldwell Office use the company’s intranet site, RWorld. Yoko attributes the success of her team’s program and the thoroughness of project documentation to their access to this interactive site, which allows employees across the country to post news and information, post comments and feedback, and share photographs. This makes it easy for the Environmental Team to share their monitoring data, wildlife photographs, and other documentation for the program.

Ruby-throated hummingbird observed in one of the pollinator gardens at the West Caldwell Office. Photo courtesy of Ricoh Group.

Ruby-throated hummingbird observed in one of the pollinator gardens at the West Caldwell Office. Photo courtesy of Ricoh Group.

Yoko says she also uses RWorld to spur employee interest in and support for the Wildlife at Work program. For example, she told me how she posts articles for her garden blog on RWorld, and also posts information and videos for events such as National Pollinator Week and Ricoh’s Global Eco Action Month this past June.

If you’re looking for ideas to better engage your employees or document your program, please WHC.

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This Year’s Christmas Tree, Next Year’s Habitat

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With the winter holiday season upon us and Christmas only a few days away, many living rooms and office lobbies are now decorated (or soon will be) with live evergreen Christmas trees. But once the holidays are over, what should we do with all of those trees?

I suggest using them to create habitat!

A post-holiday Christmas tree collection drive through a local school or community center is a great way to reach out to your local community and spread awareness about your habitat enhancement program, while also providing valuable brush for your projects.

As part of my Three Rs blog series a couple of years ago, I briefly mentioned using old Christmas trees in brush piles. Start by removing the branches from a few trees and using the trunks to create a base that lifts up the brush and provides space for wildlife to move around under cover. Intact Christmas trees or their brush can then be loosely piled on top. The needles can be left on the branches, as they will provide more cover and will be used by many birds for nest building in the spring. Creating these kinds of brush piles along the edge of your woodland or grassland will provide cover for small mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians to escape from predators, find shelter from the elements, and build nests and dens.

If you have a pond or lake, Christmas trees can also be used to create underwater cover for fish and aquatic invertebrates. You can tie together branches from the trees into a brush pile to be partially or fully sunk. Alternatively, you could sink single intact Christmas trees. Wood floats, so you’ll probably need to weigh the trees and brush piles down with a cinderblock.

It may seem obvious, but it’s still a very important to note: be sure to remove all decorations, including lights, artificial snow, ornaments, and tinsel, from the Christmas trees prior to using them in projects. These items will create litter that could harm wildlife and contaminate the water and soil nearby.

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Retaining Simplicity in Recognizing Conservation

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Humans love to complicate things. We all know that if we eat natural foods and exercise, we increase our chances of being healthy. Yet this has not stopped the growth of an entire industry of diet plans, cookbooks, and personal trainers to help us build complicated paths towards healthier lives.

The conservation world has done much the same to the simple act of improving a habitat or an ecosystem. We know if we plant the right things, at the right time, in the right place and manage them in the right way, we will see a healthier habitat and an increase in biodiversity. Yet an entire industry has developed to measure and monetize these activities and their outcomes in complex and expensive ways that can, at times, diminish the power of simple conservation actions and elevate human-centered, human-made targets over natural ones. This introduced complexity may even cause budding conservationists to pull away, fearing their efforts may be viewed as worthless.

In this world where the challenges facing our natural resources are complex, when a connected planet creates impacts far from the source, and where multiple forces are acting on wildlife populations and ecosystems, it’s indeed important to develop comprehensive tools for measurement and planning—but let’s use these tools to complement and not devalue the simple act of human-scale habitat restoration or ecological enhancement.

A typical Wildlife Habitat Council habitat enhancement program undertaken by a team of employees at a member facility somewhere on this planet has three key aspects: it enhances the ecosystem, it engages employees in design and implementation, and it connects with communities through education or recreation activities. Such a program may improve ecosystem services, may be part of a larger landscape-scale effort, and may even implement a Conservation Business Plan objective contained within a consensus-defined logic model but that’s not mandatory.

At the Wildlife Habitat Council, a program is always counted toward the goals it sets for itself – will the habitat be better at the end, will the employees be glad they engaged in this project, and have community members learned about a conservation topic in their own backyards?

If we only counted the efforts of our members under complex systems like ecosystem service measurement, many would fail and would do so for two main reasons. The first is that they have not designed the project to improve ecosystem services and the second is that they don’t have the budget necessary to measure baseline services, let alone improvements to that baseline.

The Wildlife Habitat Council is currently examining what counts in an ecological and educational framework and what we count in our application system in an effort to enhance our certification program. As we progress through this examination, engaging world-renowned experts and launching conversations around a myriad of conservation topics, we must resist the siren call of complexity and focus instead on the innate simplicity contained in nature and the ability of the humblest act to make a positive difference.

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Providing Homes for Burrowing Owls

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WHC member Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. recently partnered up with WHC’s Tucson office and the Arizona-based raptor rescue organization Wild at Heart to construct artificial burrows for rescued burrowing owls at Freeport’s Safford Operations facility. Freeport produced a video about this project and gave us permission to share it. You can watch the video to see the volunteers in action and find out more about this fantastic project.

If you live out in the western parts of the U.S., you may recognize the burrowing owl (Athene cunicularia). Unlike most owls, they are diurnal (active during the day) and nest in underground burrows. However, they don’t dig their own burrows, relying instead on the burrows dug by other animals like prairie dogs. They can often be seen standing or perching near the burrow entrance, ever on the lookout for predators like coyotes and larger raptors. (As wildlife photographer Mac Stone described this behavior, they are “so completely neurotic it’s comical.”)

A common strategy for helping burrowing owls on both public and private lands has been the installation of artificial burrows, such as the burrows installed at the Safford Operations. This project is particularly useful in areas where burrowing small mammals are not desirable.

If you have an interest in installing artificial burrows at your facility, please contact your WHC Regional Biologist.

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On Reading “The Evolution of a Corporate Idealist”

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Christine Bader, the author of “The Evolution of a Corporate Idealist,” built a career advancing human rights protection within the global business context. She started her work at BP where she helped develop BP’s human rights values and then worked on a UN initiative to start to normalize the concept of corporate responsibility in this important sphere. She defines herself as a “Corporate Idealist,” one who seeks to pursue pragmatic solutions within the corporate structure rather than advocate for disruptive change on the outside. The lessons she has learned, and shares in this fascinating book, are easily translatable into efforts to advance environmental protection within organizations whose main mission is not natural resources protection.

Many parallels can be drawn between Christine Bader’s efforts on behalf of human rights across the globe and the efforts of “Environmental Idealists,” many of whom may work with the Wildlife Habitat Council. Environmental Idealists promote best ecological practices on corporate lands, advance ecological reuse of contaminated properties and seek to instill in their peers a sense of urgency and action around the preservation and enhancement of nature within the corporate realm.

Three points made by the author will resonate with Environmental Idealists working on conservation within the corporate context.

1. The “business case” argument can be unhelpful but is necessary.

Bader presents an argument in her book that reliance on a “business case” as the only driver for good corporate behavior is a rationalization, not a justification – that the requirement to positively impact the bottom-line should not be the only reason to take steps to improve practices. She cites Sir Geoffrey Chandler, a former Shell executive who founded Amnesty International, who said ethical behavior should not need to be justified by financial reward and that expecting all management decisions to meet this “business case” is a poor guiding principle for decision making.

She does acknowledge that managers do have a business case to answer to. They are judged by decisions they take and outcomes they create that affect the bottom line. Their performance is measured in dollars and cents saved or generated. Therefore, it is in a Corporate Idealists’ best interest to understand and acknowledge the innate tensions between business and social/environmental goals.

At the Wildlife Habitat Council, members can make a bottom-line argument for engaging in their habitat restoration efforts–native planting reduces maintenance expenses; natural attenuation costs less money than constructed remediation solutions; exceeding permit expectations can reduce risk and increase predictability. In some cases, no business case is satisfied but other drivers like employee morale, community relations, or impact on biodiversity satisfy the need for a metric or KPI.

2. Distributed ownership is essential for success.

Corporate Idealists, in Bader’s book, understand that their success depends on engaging others in the effort. An Idealist knows her project has been adopted or institutionalized when someone from another function in the organization refers to it independently. Distributed ownership requires that a mandate for action is followed by a sales pitch to all the departments that will eventually be responsible for this action to be implemented and an encouragement to take ownership.

Distributed ownership can be seen in many of the Wildlife Habitat Council’s exemplary projects where leadership has bought into the idea of creating habitat enhancement projects, management supports the imperative with resources both human and financial, and employees deliver the results by creating a Wildlife Team focused on project implementation and community engagement. In fact, engaging community members and conservation and education partners can be the highest expression of distributed ownership as it takes ownership beyond the corporate org chart and into the neighborhood.

3. Incorporation into design and resource allocation is the “Holy Grail.”

According to Bader, topping any Corporate Idealists’ wish list is the incorporation of socially responsible projects into resource allocation and project approval processes. This incorporation suggests that these projects, while not focused on core mission areas, are institutionalized into operations and provides for more effective, meaningful outcomes compared to when the issues are bolted on following incidents beyond a corporation’s control. Likewise for environmental projects that seek to exceed expectation and go above and beyond requirements. If ecological values are incorporated at the design phase of any land-use activity and if resources are allocated to implementation, the conservation outcomes will be stronger and more meaningful to employees and community members. A simple act, like landscaping with native plants, can be seen as a departure from the normal approach to landscape management and, as such, becomes a heavy lift. But, once incorporated into plans, budgets, and resources, this departure seems less radical and becomes part of normal operations. For many Corporate Idealists, the biggest battles against the status quo are the internal battles against entrenched processes and perceptions.

This book is not a manifesto but more a recognition of the reality and an exploration of the challenges and opportunities to do good in a workplace that places value on those that do well.

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10 Native Vines to Attract Butterflies in North America

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Native vines are an important but often overlooked component of butterfly habitat. Many vines serve as larval host plants (food sources) for caterpillars.

They provide cover for butterflies and caterpillars, and the flowers provide nectar for butterflies (and many other pollinators, including hummingbirds).

Most native vines also have attractive foliage and colorful flowers that would provide an aesthetically-pleasing addition to your site’s landscaping.

Spring is generally the best time to install native plantings, so if you’d like to add vines for pollinators, now is the time!

Here are 10 examples of native vines you could plant to attract butterflies in North America:

  1. Dutchman’s pipe (Aristolochia spp.)
  2. Trumpet creeper (Campis radicans)
  3. Coral honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens)
  4. Passionflower (Passiflora spp.)
  5. Pipevine (Aristolochia macrophylla)
  6. Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia)
  7. Virgin’s bower (Clematis virginiana)
  8. Carolina jessamine (Gelsemium sempervirens)
  9. American wisteria (Wisteria frutescens)
  10. Crossvine (Bignonia capreolata)

It’s important to remember that these examples are not native to all of North America, so when choosing vines to plant, you should always choose species that are native to your region. Also, some species like coral honeysuckle and American wisteria have non-native, invasive counterparts, so you should be sure that you’re planting the native vine species.

If you’re outside of North America, we encourage you to consult with local native plant experts to select appropriate native vine species.

If you would like specific recommendations for your site, please contact a WHC Biologist or your local Cooperative Extension agent.

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