Greetings, This is a reminder that the Advancing Conservation in a Social Context project is asking for your help in our research into the relationship between conservation and development goals. As part of our research, we are conducting a series of surveys that examine the relationship between conservation and development goals. Thank you very much if you have already filled out one or more of our surveys. If you have not yet had the opportunity, I encourage you to click on the link in this email and take one or more of the surveys before the closing date of April 20th. Some participants have noted that the Flash program the site uses was not compatible with their computers; we have remedied this situation, and there should not be any technical obstacle to taking the survey. I am including information about the surveys and our project below the body of this email for your review. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me, Thank you in advance for considering to participate in our study, Best wishes
David Meek Research Assistant Advancing Conservation in a Social Context http://www.tradeoffs.org Center for Integrative Conservation Research http://www.cicr.uga.edu/ About the Advancing Conservation in a Social Context Survey We are looking for participants who are professionally involved in conservation and/or development, including but not limited to students, practitioners, and professors. Please feel free to pass on this link ( http://acscsurvey.asu.edu) to anyone else you think would be interested. The link in this email (http://acscsurvey.asu.edu/) will direct you to a web page that hosts our three surveys. Please read the brief description of each one, and decide which you would like to take. If you choose, you can take more than one, or all three. The survey will be open until April 20th after which point it will be closed. Each survey will take approximately 10-15 minutes. Your responses will be kept completely private and we will not retain any personal identifying data. Should you desire, you can stop taking the survey at any point. The surveys investigate the following issues: Ecosystem services • What is the relationship between biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services? • How does biodiversity conservation affect other things you might care about? • How do you think biodiversity conservation affects other ecosystem services? Are other ecosystem services enhanced by biodiversity conservation, or not? Development Goals • What is the relationship between biodiversity conservation and development goals. • There is a lot of debate about how conservation and development goals are connected. Do they help, hinder, or not affect each other? Conservation and Development • How are the benefits of conservation and development distributed, do trade-offs exist, and if so what are the trade-offs? • Who are the beneficiaries of conservation and development activities. Do all people benefit? Only some? What are the trade-offs between conservation and development? • This survey focuses on the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals, which are goals for human development, like universal education. Biodiversity conservation, or the maintenance of the number of species in an area, is one Millenium Development Goal. Who We Are: This survey is part of a broader research project on Advancing Conservation in a Social Context, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Please see www.trade-offs.org or email [email protected] for more information Also please see http://www.cicr.uga.edu/ for information on the Center for Integrative Conservation Research (CICR), whose goal is to respond, through research and training, to one of the key challenges facing conservation today: identifying conservation practices and policies that simultaneously preserve biodiversity and serve human needs. The CICR promotes the synthesis of social and biological science research methods and conceptual approaches in conservation through an integrative approach to conservation research.
