DOI: 10.5061/dryad.brv15dv75
title: Data from: Using a participatory impact assessment framework to evaluate a community-led mangrove and fisheries conservation approach in West Kalimantan, Indonesia

description: Community-based conservation (CBC) has been identified as a solution to
 biodiversity loss, climate change, and the reduction of rural poverty. The
 heterogeneity in social and economic inequalities often acts as a barrier
 to community engagement in resource management and further inhibits the
 distributional equity of social and ecological outcomes. This study
 presents a participatory impact assessment (PIA) framework that evaluated
 the outcomes of a cross-sector community-led conservation initiative.
 Community members involved in the program identified activities and
 outcomes for the Conservation Cooperative (CC), ranking the influence of
 the former on the latter as well as their daily life through multiple
 focus group discussions (FGDs). Participants were asked to rank the impact
 of activities on outcomes and the scale of the outcome which was totaled
 to identify the most impactful program activities and outcomes during the
 project period. Community members reported improved income, health,
 education and the creation of a locally-led natural resource management
 system. Members also reported improved crab harvest rates and reduced
 mangrove deforestation. Environmental outcomes identified by community
 members through the PIA were verified through a secondary spatial analysis
 and mud-crab independent fisheries monitoring. The results support the
 hypothesis that environmental NGOs need to consider a multi-dimensional
 view of human well-being, and that cross-sector integrated interventions
 may be effective at improving multiple outcomes. Future steps should focus
 on spatial replication of the CC program which will provide further
 insights by testing for differences in outcomes between villages, how
 those are impacted by preexisting social and ecological systems, and
 comparing outcomes between control sites that did not receive
 interventions.
description: The PIA was adopted from the PRISM Conservation Evaluation
 toolkit (Dickson et al. 2017). The framework was adapted to include a
 nested ranking system to evaluate indirect changes identified by community
 members, changes that can be directly attributed to the project, and the
 impact these changes have made in people’s lives. In addition, the PIA was
 designed to follow the nine principles presented in Woodhouse et al.
 (2015), to evaluate the impact of conservation interventions on human
 well-being. The PIA method focused on project beneficiaries and hinges on
 basic knowledge of the project activities by the members of the FGD.
 Within the first step of the PIA FGD, members created an <i>activity
 list </i>based upon their knowledge of program progress to date.
 They were then asked to score each of the activities for each of the
 following criteria. The importance of an
 activity as a motivator to engage in the conservation
 cooperative. The importance of the activity for your
 daily life. The time expended by the community in
 implementing this activity. Scores were on
 a scale of one to four, where one is low importance / labour and four is
 high importance / labour.   The
 second step of the PIA was to create an <i>Influence Matrix
 </i>based upon the results and activities in step one.  Activities
 from step one were discussed and facilitators asked community members if
 there were similar activities that could be combined. If members proposed
 combinations, similar activities were consolidated into large umbrella
 activities. FGD participants identified <i>changes</i> that
 have occurred in the community. These were then consolidated by
 participants into six areas of most significant change since the start of
 the program in August 2017. Participants scored the level of influence of
 each activity on the observed change, with <i>0 = No Influence, 1 =
 Weak Influence, 2 = Moderate Influence and 3 = Strong Influence.
 </i>Results were discussed with all FGD participants to understand
 the reasoning behind rankings and the FGD decided upon the final
 scores.   The PIA was conducted
 twice, on two different FGD’s. First with a mixture of men and women
 involved in the program, and second with village leaders, cooperative
 leaders, and important village figures. The first FGD was conducted with 7
 men and 5 women in May 2019. Program participants were informed three days
 prior to the FGD and on the day of the FGD we capped the group at the
 first 12 individuals who arrived. We asked the important figures to not
 join the first FGD to prevent leaders from dominating the discussion and
 over-rule community members in nested scoring. The second FGD was
 conducted in June 2019 and consisted of 5 men and 2 women, all important
 figures within the village. FGDs were not repeated with members of
 villagers who did not enroll in the Conservation Cooperative, the PIA
 asked program participants to reflect upon activities and outcomes not
 applicable to non-program members. FGDs discussions lasted 3-4 hours with
 a lunch break included.   All
 respondents were told upon the start of the FGD the objective of the PIA
 and that the results would be shared with FGD members at the end of the
 session. We asked members to be truthful in their responses and informed
 individuals that their feedback would not harm the program or individuals
 themselves, but would be used to improve the program in future months. 
 The methodology, process, and intended use of the PIA was clearly
 explained to members before the FGD and all individuals were given a
 choice to voluntarily join if they were interested. Verbal consent was
 required by each individual before the start of the FGD. Throughout the
 FGD participants were allowed to leave at any point and the facilitation
 team fully respected all rights and well-being of participants. All names
 of members were kept confidential and individuals were given a chance to
 opt-out if they felt uncomfortable.  
     <i>2.4 Fisheries
 Independent Data </i>   To add
 complementary data to support PIA findings the success of the TMR to
 improve mud crab harvest, fisheries independent data was collected.
 Sampling occurred seven days before the closure began in November 2018 and
 seven days before the TMR rivers re-opened to fisheries in February 2019.
 A minimum of 20 crab pots were randomly deployed in each river. All three
 TMR rivers were sampled and effort was distributed across them to account
 for natural variation. The four rivers that were sampled as controls were
 immediately adjacent to the TMR rivers, two to the north and two to the
 south, to eliminate geographical variation as a factor. Mean carapace
 width of crabs in centimetres, number of crabs and number of pots were
 recorded. Catch per unit effort (CPUE) was calculated by dividing the
 number of crabs by the number of pots for each zone in each sampling
 period.   Mean carapace width and
 CPUE were compared between two zones (open and TMR rivers) in two sampling
 periods (November 2018, February 2019), for four total sampling units.
 Zones were compared against each other within each sampling period, and
 each zone was compared between sampling periods. All statistical tests
 were conducted in R studio (version  1.2.1335). The mean carapace width
 comparisons were conducted using two sample independent t-tests, and when
 the assumption of normality was not satisfied, transformations were
 explored. If these did not satisfy this assumption, a Wilcoxon rank sum
 test with continuity correction was conducted. CPUE comparisons were
 conducted using a generalised linear model with a quasi poisson
 distribution, where x values were discrete and represented the sampling
 unit.   <i>2.5 Mangrove Forest
 Cover and Disturbance </i> To test that
 indicators of tree cover loss observed from the PIA had been achieved, a
 simple spatial analysis was conducted to detect the occurrence of mangrove
 clearing during the project period. We analyzed tree cover data and
 mangrove forest coverage using data from the Global Forest Watch platform
 from the World Resource Institute (Hansen et al. 2016, 2017, 2018). To
 test for disturbance, tree cover loss within the 3054-hectare project area
 was analysed using Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) alerts and
 Terra Alerts (Hansen et. al. 2016, 2017, 2018). There was a limitation to
 the Global Forest Watch platform at calculating fine-scale forest
 disturbance which therefore restricted our analysis to mangrove forests
 within the area using Global Mangrove Watch (v2.0, Bunting et. al. 2018).
 We analyzed tree cover loss from intact forests (defined by having greater
 than 75% canopy density) from January 1, 2001 to December 31, 2018, and
 GLAD alerts from January 1, 2015 to April 30, 2019. According to Global
 Forest Watch, tree cover is defined as all vegetation greater than five
 meters in height and may take the form of natural forests or plantations
 across a range of canopy densities. Tree cover loss is defined as “stand
 replacement disturbance,” or the complete removal of tree cover canopy at
 the Landsat pixel scale (30 meters by 30 meters). A GLAD alert is an
 observation of tree cover loss on a per pixel basis by a supervised
 learning algorithm, therefore one GLAD alert is equal to a tree cover loss
 of 30m by 30m (ref). The clear land surface observations in the satellite
 images were assembled and a supervised learning algorithm was applied to
 identify per pixel tree cover loss.
description: The community identified 11 core activities, of which all but the
 chip making training were identified as ‘important’ or ‘very important’
 motivators to engage in the cooperative. All activities with the exception
 of training on TMRs were rated as ‘important’ or ‘very important’ for
 daily life (Table 1). The fish chip making training was the only activity
 not discussed in the Influence mapping.  
 The activities requiring the greatest time commitment from the
 community are the closure system, patrols and the meetings of the
 Conservation Cooperative. There were no areas where the amount of labour
 expended was disproportionate to the importance given to the activities.
 Health services was an instrumental motivator for project engagement, very
 important for daily life and required limited community labour.
   &lt;INPUT TABLE 1&gt;
 Below is a description on how to use and interpret this data
 set: The mixed FGD identified six major outcomes of the
 program, and compiled the activities into six interventions (Table 2).
 Improvements in mangrove and fisheries management was the area with the
 highest magnitude of positive change with a score of 17. Increased income
 and savings were the second highest level of change (14), reduced illegal
 logging was the third highest (13) and the lowest was improved health and
 better education levels (11). The conservation cooperative was identified
 as the most important activity overall, having a strong influence on all
 changes identified with a score of 18. The activity driving the least
 amount of change across multiple areas were mangrove patrol units
 (11). The village leaders FGD identified five project
 activities (Table 3). Village leaders felt more comfortable grouping
 activities such as ‘Cooperative Monthly Meetings’ and ‘Savings and Loans
 Program’ as well as ‘Conservation Agreement’ and ‘Monthly Mangrove
 Patrols’ together. Village leaders listed all activities as very important
 for daily life and as a motivator to join the cooperative, with the
 exception of the Conservation Agreement and Mangrove Patrols which was
 rated as less important for daily life than others. As identified by the
 community FGD , health was found to be a ‘low level of labour expended,’ 
 but conversely village leaders did not find that the Conservation
 Cooperative was time consuming which was ranked the same as the health
 program in labour expenditure (Table 2). The FGD
 conducted with only village leaders yielded different results to the FGD
 with community members. Village leaders identified five major outcomes
 with the ‘Conservation Agreement and Monthly patrols’ having the largest
 impact across multiple outcomes. The outcome with the greatest magnitude
 of change, according to village leaders, was ‘improved community assets’
 that were both financial and non-financial. Similar to the mixed FGD
 health activities were listed as low labour expended and high impact.
 Interestingly, village leaders noted that the cooperative activities
 required a low level of labour while the mixed FGD identified is as
 requiring high labour.    
 <i>Fisheries Independent Data</i>
   Crabs in the open rivers were significantly
 larger than in the TMR rivers in November (W = 78, p-value = 0.00132), but
 after the closure crabs were significantly larger in the TMR rivers than
 the open ones (t = 3.703, df = 41, p-value = 0.000629 (Fig. 2). Crabs in
 open rivers were the same size in November and February (W = 1082, p-value
 = 0.561), however in the TMR rivers, crabs were significantly larger after
 the 3 month closure (W = 94, p-value = 0.000441 (Fig. 2). The size of
 crabs in the rivers open to fishers remained the same, while rivers that
 were closed temporarily, went from significantly smaller crabs before the
 closure compared to open, to significantly larger than it was as well as
 becoming significantly larger than in open rivers.
   CPUE was significantly greater in open
 rivers compared to TMR ones in November (p-value = 0.028), and was similar
 in all rivers in February (p-value = 0.333 (Fig. 3). CPUE remained the
 same for TMR rivers in both sampling periods (p-value = 0.782), however in
 open rivers it significantly decreased after 3 months (p-value = 0.0039
 (Fig. 3). There was no impact on CPUE in TMR rivers, however, CPUE in open
 rivers went from significantly greater in TMR ones before the closure, to
 significantly less over 3 months to become similar to the closed
 river.)