Griffin Groups: A Free Online Tool to Support Large Landscape Conservation

Griffin Groups (https://griffingroups.com) is a free online tool for building a community of conservation communities. Connecting Conservation designed Griffin Groups  to address the need for integrated knowledge transfer across disciplines, organizations, tools, and geographies in order to assist the transformation of natural resource conservation as a practice from independent to coordinated activities that address strategic public-private partnership goals. In the most basic sense, Griffin Groups is a social network of social networks dedicated to conservation topics. It provides innovative, free, user-friendly methods to 1) create networked forums and websites, 2) aggregate dynamic content about conservation topics published through other web services, 3) integrate Griffin Groups forums into other web sites and services via URL, RSS feed, and an application programing interface (API), and 4) integrate other tools into Griffin Groups via similar methods. Examples of how groups are used include those dedicated to the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy, IUCN-CMP Threats and Actions Taxonomy update, US-NABCI Monitoring Subcommittee, International Partners in Flight strategic plan implementation, Landscape Conservation Design, and several groups dedicated to migratory bird species research and conservation. Awareness of Griffin Groups has grown almost exclusively by word of mouth and visitors are increasingly returning to Griffin Groups within any given week, indicating that it is becoming part of collaborative workflows. This presentation will introduce some of the features of Griffin Groups and showcase examples of how the site is being used to improve knowledge transfer and communications for coordinated large landscape conservation.