Hundreds of millions of dollars of public funding are invested annually in projects that aim to deliver research that can improve people’s lives and safeguard the environment. To invest that money wisely, we need to know how to design projects so that they will successfully address the information needs of natural resource managers. By using a process of systematic evaluation to assess the effectiveness of past projects, we can start to identify shared characteristics that make funded research more likely to provide accessible and usable information to resource managers both within and beyond the Department of the Interior.
Applied science projects pose a particular evaluation challenge. These projects have two goals: they aim both to advance the frontier of scientific knowledge and also to deliver results and products that can be used to inform management decisions. In this context, the few existing evaluation studies all use qualitative data and approaches that are hard to scale up, making it difficult to identify broadly applicable best practices.
The goal of this project is to develop quantitative and scalable approaches to evaluate applied science projects based both on how they innovate and how well they address natural resource managers’ information needs. Researchers will focus on projects that aim to help federal and state natural resource managers, as well as resource users, adapt to changing environmental conditions. They will draw on existing information and new survey data to evaluate a set of science projects aimed at informing adaptation strategies of stakeholders such as the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Southeast region. Based on this analysis, researchers will identify project design characteristics associated with success both in innovating and in informing natural resource management practice. These analyses will ensure that public funding for science is more effectively invested by improving future project designs to maximize the chance for project success.
