Cost-effective resource management: Making collaboration count
Background/Question/Methods: Environmental governance requires diverse groups of stakeholders (government agencies, restoration organizations, tribes, etc.) to collectively address ecological challenges across jurisdictional boundaries. However, building and maintaining collaborative relationships does not always yield environmental benefit and comes at a substantial cost for resource managers who often must meet a variety of conservation goals with limited time and money. This project uses emerging methods in social-ecological network analysis to understand the interactions between network governance structures, wetland connectivity, and environmental outcomes of wetland conservation in Montana. Building on recent theory, we identified specific social-ecological network substructures that should positively impact wetland conservation outcomes. To empirically test the impact of these network substructures on environmental outcomes, we used a mixed methods approach to estimate the social-ecological network which underpins wetland conservation in Montana. First, we surveyed wetland conservation organizations to assess their collaborative relationships across organizations and determine their ties to specific wetlands. We then used remote sensing to identify structural wetland connectivity as measured by roads and waterways that allow for the movement of plant species between wetlands, and we assessed wetland quality using the Floristic Quality Indexes compiled by the Montana Natural Heritage Program.
Results/Conclusions: We identified 170 stakeholders who play a variety of roles in wetland conservation in Montana. These stakeholders each identified between 0 and 5 wetlands which have been a primary focus for their organization. We coupled this information with the wetland monitoring data from the Montana Natural Heritage Program which identifies approximately 2,125,476 wetland acres in the state. We measured the frequencies of specific, local network sub-structures and estimated their association with wetland quality by comparing these frequencies to Monte Carlo simulated exponential random graph models. Overall, we found better alignment between governance networks and wetland connectivity to be associated with improved wetland quality. Our findings provide a framework that can inform strategic relationship-building for cost-effective resource management.