The International Congress for Conservation Biology (ICCB) will be hosted virtually from December 13th through the 17th. Pre-congress sessions, including workshops and training courses led by CBO faculty and affiliates, will take place on December 6th through 8th. 

CBO Assistant Center Director, Gwen Iacona, will be leading a workshop on Collecting and reporting the costs of conservation interventions, which will help communicate the how the financial cost of conservation is necessary, although the collection of good cost data might be a challenge. Assistant Director Iacona’s workshop, funded through her work with the Arthur and Elaine Johnson Foundation, will examine costing exercises in endangered species compliance, plastic pollution prevention, and marine protected area management. Through this workshop, she hopes participants achieve and understanding an identification and collection of appropriate cost data for decision support, reporting on cost data, and designing cost data management systems for new projects. 

Paola Sangolqui, a graduate student with the Conservation Innovation Lab, will be presenting on Conserving smarter: Using decision science to address the biodiversity crisis. Paola’s talk will be presenting work on bringing structured decision making to marine conservation in the Galapagos, funded through the Lenfest Ocean Program. This session will also introduce the newly established Decision Science Working Group, of which CBO Founding Director Leah Gerber is a member of. The workshop will be exploring the field of decision science and examining how this provides potential opportunities to apply it to decision problems faced by conservation experts. This workshop will allow participants to learn how to frame conservation decisions, deconstruct those decisions into key steps, sandwich best tools and frameworks to apply to that decision problem.