Measure

How do we know we are successful?

Measuring the success of our conservation and restoration efforts must be tackled on a project-by-project basis. Coastal Resilience takes a multi-faceted science approach to designing local projects on the ground as well as global indicators of success. To consistently track project outcomes and identify areas for improvement in tool effectiveness and communication of results, we have developed a list of performance measures for the Coastal Resilience program.

As part of this development, we have defined the program within four themes:

The diagram shows the interconnected and iterative nature of the science and technology themes, and the people and business themes are placed as to illustrate the intersection and collaboration among the various stakeholder groups.

  • Decision Support Technology: the suite of Coastal Resilience tools used to support decision-making to decrease ecological and socioeconomic risks from coastal hazards
  • Science Application and Modeling: Scientific research and modelling efforts concerning effective conservation and restoration to reduce risk
  • People and Practitioner: the network of communities, practitioners, and policymakers that use tools to protect people and ecosystems in coastal areas through conservation and restoration of habitats
  • Business Impacts: emerging stakeholder group of interest that will use tools to take into account nature-based solutions to benefit coastal communities, their bottom line and overall success

Science Publications

Restoration and Conservation Actions

Communities

Within each of these themes, we have identified priority resources inputs and regular activities as well as short, medium, and long-term outcomes. From the full list of outcomes, our team, with review from the Coastal Resilience network, developed 17 priority measures according to criteria including: significance, added value, span of control, feasibility, clarity, comparability, and verifiability. The measures will be collected through a combination of analytics and surveys to both internal and external partners. Semi-annual analytics will be collected, compiled and then shared annually alongside the complete suite of measures of tool effectiveness across the four themes.

Priority Measures:

MeasureTypePrimary ThemeMethodology categoryUnit of MeasureFrequency of collection
Practitioners on network list serve and newsletter recipientsOutputPeopleAnalyticsNumberQuarterly; assess annually
Peer review and other publicationsOutputScience applicationAnalyticsNumberQuarterly; assess annually
Twitter followersOutputPeopleAnalyticsNumberQuarterly; assess annually
Visitors to mapping sitesOutputTechnologyAnalyticsNumberMonthly; assess annually
Visitors to websiteOutputPeopleAnalyticsNumberMonthly; assess annually
Tool applications and project sitesOutputTechnologyAnalyticsNumberAnnually
Tool applications developed for business audienceOutputBusinessAnalyticsNumberAnnually
Collaborative apps developedOutputBusinessAnalyticsNumberAnnually
Area covered relative to habitats of concernOutputTechnologySurvey and analysisNumberAnnually
New business partnersShort-term outcomeBusinessAnalyticsNumberAnnually
Agencies and organizations using CR-DST for planningShort-term outcomeTechnologyAnalyticsNumberAnnually
Local and enterprise partnershipsShort-term outcomePeopleAnalyticsPercentage and qualitativeAnnually
Training participant understanding of CR-DSTShort-term outcomeTechnologyAnalytics and interviewNumber, narrativeAnnually
Individuals trainedShort-term outcomeTechnologySurvey and analysisProject examplesAnnually
Stakeholder awareness of CR-DSTShort-term outcomeTechnologySurvey and analysisPercentage Annually
Examples/case studies of CR-DST useIntermediate outcomeTechnologyAnalytics, surveyNumberAnnually
Demonstrated tool application for site implementationLong-term outcomeTechnologyInterviewsPercentage Annually

Photo credit: Tim Calver