Rebecca Goldburg, Director of Environmental Science at The Pew Charitable Trusts presents: Cultivating actionable science that informs conservation decision-making.

How should science projects be designed and implemented so that they inform environmental policy or natural resource management? Since 2008, The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Environmental Science Division has been managing several programs that support conservation science -- primarily projects concerning ocean protection. Early efforts focused largely on identifying promising ideas to address policy or management questions, supporting researchers in conducting projects and communicating research results to target audiences. The division is now employing a wider range of approaches such as citizen science projects that engage stakeholders in collecting data and projects pursued collaboratively with issue advocates and others who will directly use the results. The science division’s work, project examples and their experiences and challenges as they consider new projects and assess the effectiveness of completed projects will be covered.