New beginnings in collaborative conservation
Creators: name: Warner, Ed
Publisher: name: Mountain Scholar
Year: 2009
Subjects: innovations
collaborative conservation
ecosystem services
adaptive management approach

description: Presented at the Bridging the gap: collaborative conservation from the ground up conference, September 8-11, 2009, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, sponsored by the Center for Collaborative Conservation, https://collaborativeconservation.org/. This conference brought together people with experience working collaboratively to achieve both conservation and livelihood goals in tribal nations, rangelands, forests, watersheds, agricultural lands, and urban areas. Ed Warner is a noted philanthropist and conservationist. In 2005, Colorado State University named the College of Natural Resources after him following a major gift that also founded the Center for Collaborative Conservation as part of the college. His work as an independent petroleum geologist culminated in his discovery and participation in Jonah Field and the first commercial development of Pinedale Field, located adjacent to Jonah Field in Sublette County, Wyoming. Jonah and Pinedale combined represent the third largest gas accumulation ever discovered within the continental United States. Warner retired from the natural gas industry at the end of 2000 to pursue philanthropy full time. In 2005, he placed forty-fifth on the Slate 60 list of American Philanthropy. He has made major gifts to Colorado State University, the Sand County Foundation, MIT, Grand Valley State University and the Colorado Conservation Trust. Warner has been a visiting lecturer for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists and holds two honorary faculty positions at CSU, a faculty affiliate position in the Dept. of Geosciences, and a professorship in Cooperative Conservation. He has lectured at CSU, Stanford, MIT, Texas A and M, Grand Valley State University, Missouri State University and Cape Town University. Although Warner occasionally lectures on topics in geology, most of his current lectures are focused upon cooperative conservation. He has been professionally published in three fields: geology, conservation biology and virology. He also writes book reviews for Denver-based Bloomsbury Review. He is a trustee or director of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the Sand County Foundation, the Explorers Foundation and is a past trustee of the Geological Society of America Foundation and the American Geological Institute Foundation. He is also an advisor to the Colorado Cattlemen's Agricultural Land Trust. Warner earned a M.S. degree from UCLA and a B.S. degree from CSU, both in geology.
description: Collaborative conservation requires a great deal of work in order to succeed. Innovations such as inclusiveness of participation, use of market-based incentives, landscape or even eco-region scale of projects, protection of property rights and negotiation instead of litigation lead to testable outcomes. The development of new tools such as ecosystem services, the use of cost/risk analysis and long-term monitoring—all developed within an adaptive management approach—give us a chance to get the available funds working for us on the ground.