The Conservation Measures Partnership developed the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation (OS), a system that incorporates theories and principles of adaptive management from a variety of disciplines to produce a planning and evaluation process broadly applicable across temporal, geographic, and programmatic scales. OS allows teams to systematically select conservation targets, identify threats, develop mitigation strategies, and produce theories for observed changes. It also produces tangible goals and objectives, defines progress metrics, and facilitates ongoing adaptive management by documenting results of strategies, allowing methods to be refined. Using OS, installation managers could examine threats and strategy ratings to prioritize objectives and solutions, and reduce funding needs.
The Institute for Wildlife Studies began implementing the OS framework to provide guidance to the Department of Defense in helping to plan for endangered species recovery on San Clemente Island. We used the endangered San Clemente loggerhead shrike as a single-species project model to identify threats and develop strategies to mitigate those threats and implement conservation measures.

Because many of the threats and strategies for conserving shrikes would overlap with those for conserving SCI’s other natural resources, a solid base for an island-wide plan had already been established. We then applied the OS framework to the entire island. The proposed island-wide plan would expand on the shrike plan by including species such as the threatened San Clemente Bell’s sparrow, focal conservation species San Clemente island fox, recently delisted island night lizard, and the wide variety of endemic and/or listed flora of SCI. Team members included representatives from vertebrate and invertebrate recovery programs on SCI, botanical recovery and management programs, United States Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Bureau of Land Management, and SCI military operations.