Measuring Project Success 2 Like any other project, conservation projects are designed to change something, to have an impact on some state or condition. The main goal of this change is to protect biodiversity. One of the major differences we see between conservation projects and other projects, however, is that it is often difficult to define—in clear, operational terms—precisely what it is that conservation projects are trying to achieve. In a business setting, the project goal is usually financial profit and it is usually pretty easy to evaluate how much money a company is making or losing. For a health project, it is relatively easy to measure the health status of a particular population and to track changes over time to measure the success of a given intervention. But for conservation projects, what practical and meaningful measures of project impact are available to us? ...