Human Nature Group

Human Nature Group has just returned from Hawai’i, where the 44th International Sea Turtle Symposium was recently held 🐢

There, with our colleagues at Oceanic Society and State of the World’s Sea Turtles, we gave our 4th annual workshop entitled, “Developing Behavior Change Strategies for Effective Sea Turtle Conservation.” This year, we featured real-world case studies submitted from the Aquarium of the Pacific in California USA, COSEED (Coastal Sustainable Environmental and Economic Development) in Kenya, and Fudena in Venezuela - with topics ranging from fisheries bycatch to ghost gear entanglement to direct harvest. Workshop participants applied their expertise in sea turtle conservation with their newfound knowledge of behavioral science to create behavior change action plans for each case study!

We are immensely grateful to have been able to continue this important capacity-building work this year thanks to the support of the AZA Sea Turtle SAFE program and an anonymous donor.

We are happy to share the final report for our collective evaluation of AZA SAFE Monarch visitor programming. We assessed the progress towards and achievement of desired visitor outcomes of monarch engagement programming offered by 10 partner institutions across the country 🌱

You can access the both 1) the final report, and 2) a recorded webinar reviewing the results and recommendations, at the QR code provided or at the following link: https://sites.google.com/monarchjointventure.org/safemonarchsnetwork/safe-monarchs-network/evaluation-project/final-report-and-webinar?authuser=0tsentsu

In collaboration with the AZA SAFE Coral Program, Human Nature Group is proud to introduce two new toolkits to help conservationists and educators improve desired outcomes of their coral conservation communication & messaging efforts! Available in both abridged and extended formats, we hope that these toolkits help organizations to make an impact for coral through their interactions with visitors, guests, and the public. Access the toolkits at https://www.safecoral.org/social-science-projects 🪸

Human Nature Group has been all about the terrestrial turtles this week, as we attended the 23rd Annual Symposium on the Conservation of Tortoises and Freshwater Turtles hosted by Turtle Survival Alliance 🐢

We were delighted to provide a workshop at the symposium this year, introducing key concepts of behavioral science and the development of conservation human behavior change strategies. As one attendee said, the workshop will help “not only in my conservation work, but with my interpersonal interactions with coworkers and students.”

We offer different versions and lengths of this workshop to fit various organizational needs - please reach out if you are interested in this topic or other capacity-building workshops from Human Nature Group.

Thanks for counting down to the new year with us! We’ve enjoyed sharing what we have been up to. From monarchs, to coral, to sea turtles… we love working to save wildlife by integrating social science into conservation strategies. Together, we can leave this world better than we found it. We encourage you to reflect on how you’ve impacted the world this year and move into the next with the inspiration to do even more. The world is a beautiful place with beautiful people, let's cherish it 🌎

We are excited to participate in the upcoming annual International Sea Turtle Symposium in March 2025 in Accra, Ghana! This will be our third time hosting our workshop on behavior change strategies for sea turtle conservation at this conference. This year, we will be focusing on applying behavior change strategies to case studies submitted from sea turtle projects in West Africa. We can’t wait to see old friends, meet new ones, and explore the culture of Ghana!

We love working with AZA! In addition to our monarch project, we are partnering with the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Saving Animals from Extinction (SAFE) Coral program to assess the current state of their messaging efforts and create an evidence-based toolkit for future communications. We will be interviewing several practitioners about their institutions’ efforts to inspire their guests to learn more about, connect with, and act to protect coral. We can’t wait to share what we learn!

This year, we had the pleasure of presenting at the first annual Society for Conservation Biology Social Science Working Group conference. We were thrilled to see an entire conference dedicated to conservation social science and the sessions did not disappoint! We presented on the Team BEACH model of integrating social science into sea turtle conservation in hopes it will provide inspiration for others to do the same with the species they work with.

📸: ZeroEye Photography

We are partnering with the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Saving Animals from Extinction (SAFE) Monarch program to lead a collective evaluation of their public engagement efforts. We first held a workshop and several feedback sessions to determine a set of consensus-based outcomes that all monarch-focused programming should aim to achieve. We then created and pilot tested a survey instrument that we will soon be rolling out in over 10 SAFE Monarch institutions in the Spring! We can’t wait to start collecting data to measure progress towards their goals and inform program improvement to collectively lift the field of monarch conservation programming 🌿