Perspectives on the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation

The Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation (OS), and its software platform Miradi, are becoming central tools for conservation management. There is, however, very little literature on either after 5 years of widespread implementation. We applied the OS, using Miradi, to five widely varied conservation projects as the foundation for this perspective. We find, in general, that the OS are logical, clear, and provide a robust hierarchical structure from which to organize management action and track progress toward conservation project goals. One goal of the Conservation Measures Partnership in creating the OS is to foster a community of practice for conservation. To better accomplish this, we recommend working toward: (1) creating a library of case studies to illustrate tension between structure and flexibility in the OS for project management; (2) broadening definitions of conservation targets and threats to accommodate the variety of conservation projects; (3) developing critical linkages between the OS to complementary conservation tools (e.g., structured decision-making, spatial planning tools); (4) clearly distinguishing between using threats rankings for action prioritization given expert opinion versus testing hypotheses to gain a mechanistic understanding of cause and effect; and (5) developing rapid assessment tools for the OS to better discern when conservation projects should invest in the cost of fully developing a plan using the OS. We call on both academics and the conservation practitioners to better engage with one another for the benefit of training, cross-project learning and better conservation action.