Knowledge Needs & Knowledge Sharing Workshop
On the October 25, 2012 a CVB stakeholder workshop was held in Bendigo to identify what key themes and issues groups perceived they faced in successfully achieving their current or planned project goals. Five topics were presented for discussion by all participants in a world café style forum. The topics were;
- The impact of fragmentation and loss of connectivity on our habitats
- Planning for, and responding to, extreme climate change
- Managing invasive plants and animals
- Monitoring and protecting threatened species
- Connecting, communicating and building human capacity in the CVB?
Participants were asked what the key information needs were under these themes and to consider the role CVB should play in providing enabling support in these areas, in other words what was needed over and above knowledge and information to build groups capacity to act in these areas.
There was no disagreement on the importance of themes encapsulated by the topics and considerable agreement about what some of the key questions needing answering under these topics were.
Information identified as being needed was of three kinds. One was primary scientific information needed to inform priorities and restoration approaches. A second type of information identified as being valuable was that that was already held amongst the group, both scientific and based on practical experience. And the third type of information sought was that that could be generated through the collaborative efforts of individual groups – the baseline pictures of what projects have been undertaken or are being planned, of threats and other needed information, made more powerful through being placed in a landscape-scale context.
Information from the workshop will provide a solid foundation for the development of tools and processes that will allow the sharing of existing knowledge held by stakeholders and a basis to direct filling the gaps.