Evaluating Education Programs for Marine Conservation
By Maddie Paris and Claire Huang
What makes biodiversity and ecosystem conservation efforts successful? This is a pressing question for the field of conservation on a global scale. Within the last year, the United Nations declared 2021 to 2030 as the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. This was also the main question we explored this year with our Bass Connections Student Research Award project. We were especially interested in collecting evidence of how education and outreach can contribute to marine conservation goals.
Our project was a natural extension of the Bass Connections Ocean Evidence Gap Map project, which examines a broad range of conservation interventions, from marine protected areas to fishery management. We chose to hone in on education and outreach as one of the areas that was a noticeable “gap” in the research literature. Simultaneously, as students trained in marine ecology, we were both passionate about thinking about the ways humans relate to their environment.
With the guidance and assistance from Becca Horan (PhD, Marine Science and Conservation), our faculty advisor Dr. David Gill, and former Bass Connections team lead Morgan Rudd, we developed an extensive search string to target the types of papers that would meet our criteria. This was a completely new experience for both of us to design and start a systematic literature review process from scratch. We were able to adapt a lot of the skills we learned as members of the Bass research team, like how to screen papers effectively but accurately and how to organize and manage our time for this meticulous, time-consuming research process.
The screening process was definitely daunting, with thousands of potentially relevant papers that we needed to screen through in order to find ones that actually evaluated education, outreach, or training programs related to marine conservation. The abstract screening process also raised incredibly interesting questions that led to provoking discussions. Does a coral reef VR experience for tourists count as an “educational or conservation intervention” if it might increase their likelihood of donating to a conservation organization? Will a change in knowledge and behavior within a coastal community actually result in better stewardship and positive, desired ecological outcomes? We also engaged in thoughtful conversations about the process of conducting science and on the equity dimensions of marine conservation. For instance, our initial results showed that most education or training programs were implemented by NGOs or academic organizations external to the actual community or audience they were targeting. As students whose research has largely focused on the environmental realm (e.g. ecological interactions in salt marshes for Maddie; fish population restoration for Claire), it was useful to step back to view the broader social contexts for our work.
One of the highlights of our Bass Connections experience was presenting our initial findings at the People & Nature Symposium, hosted by the Duke University Graduate Program in Ecology. The themes of the conference were focused on place-based research that incorporates people and communities in science, as well as environmental justice. Maddie hopes to eventually pursue a PhD while Claire will continue working at the intersection of conservation science & policy, so communicating the importance of this evidence synthesis work is crucial to our career goals.
In a way, learning about how different education and skill-building interventions can change behaviors towards the environment influenced our own perceptions towards conservation as well. Our hope is that NGOs, policy-makers, and conservation practitioners who are actively designing programs to improve conservation outcomes may use our research to inform how to engage communities that rely on coastal resources.