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Who We Are > Annual Report 2006

Partnerships That Count image

Mary Klein Every community, no matter how large or small, is seeking ways to grow while sustaining its citizens' health and quality of life. The past year I have visited with many of our partners, listening to their needs and reflecting on how NatureServe can help them effectively conserve the places they care about. Wherever I traveled, people expressed great concerns about the challenges facing conservation. From the grasslands of Colorado, to the lowlands of coastal Georgia, to the rainforests of Peru, people with a deep love for the land are grappling with changing land uses, unfamiliar climate patterns, and economic uncertainty.

In many different places, people told me that one of their biggest challenges is a knowledge gap: finding and applying reliable, current information about the ecosystems their communities depend upon. Landowners, local officials, and corporate executives all agree that they cannot effectively conserve a place without understanding its habitats, species, and ecological processes—and how each part relates to the whole.

NatureServe has listened to this need. And in response, we have established a new vision for how we will help guide effective conservation action. Our strategic plan, completed in 2006, organizes our work around three key goals: informing natural resource decisions, advancing scientific understanding, and building conservation capacity. This plan raises the bar for our network of member programs to provide information and analyses that are not only the most relevant, current, and scientifically credible, but also tailored to the specific needs of our partners and clients.

One example, in particular, illustrates the practical value of this approach. With the generous support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, NatureServe is deeply engaged with partners and communities on the eastern slope of the Andes in Peru and Bolivia, where we have accomplished the following:

Informing natural resource decisions: Working in cooperation with the regional government of San Martín, Peru, we identified high priorities for conservation action, considering not just environmental factors, but population, policy, and land use issues as well.
Advancing scientific understanding: Scientists from NatureServe and local institutions developed the most reliable picture yet of the region’s habitat types and its endemic species of plants, birds, mammals, and amphibians. We used this knowledge to identify previously unrecognized centers of endemism that urgently need protection.
Building conservation capacity: Because lasting conservation requires local support and local capacity, we invested in technology upgrades for our network members in Peru and Bolivia, helped local institutions to computerize key data sets, and hosted training workshops to share new techniques for habitat mapping and species analysis.

From experience, we have learned that creating good scientific information alone is not enough to achieve conservation; we have to actively help people access and understand information so they can apply it to their own unique challenges. Through a spirit of cooperation and knowledge-sharing, NatureServe can help communities understand and connect with special places, motivating them to invest in conservation as an essential part of a high quality of life. I invite everyone who cares about an ecologically sustainable future to join with us in harnessing the power of information to transform how society views and values the natural world.