GOSLINER & BURKE: FROM PARACPIUTES TO PARTNERSHIPS 
21 
Photo 2. Bankas are the traditional outrigger eanoes eommonly used by flsherfolk and seuba divers in the Philippines. 
Photographer unknown. 
that there is an urgent need to rapidly transmit and translate new seientifie information beyond the 
audienee of fellow seientists. The model elearly aeeelerates the proeess of diseovery, distillation, 
and dissemination of information to a global eommunity and underseores the role of loeal and glob¬ 
al partnerships in developing shared knowledge about the natural world in the twenty-first eentu- 
ry. 
With its 2011 Philippine Biodiversity Expedition, the Aeademy set out to maximize partner¬ 
ships with the host eountry. Partners ineluded Filipino seientists and students, edueators, journal¬ 
ists, eultural and environmental institutions, policy and regulatory agencies, and local community 
leaders. Academy scientists had been working closely with scientific, educational, and conserva¬ 
tion partners in the Philippines for many years, but wanted to achieve greater impact by making 
scientific results more accessible and meaningful in relation to conservation impacts. The Acade¬ 
my was also interested in leveraging expedition results back home to enrich its Living Philippine 
Coral Reef exhibit and to experiment with more effective and compelling ways of disseminating 
scientific results in its public floor and educational programs. Another strong desire was to test 
whether scientists would be willing to report their observations immediately to scientific and gen¬ 
eral audiences. This idea represented a huge departure from the traditional model in which scien¬ 
tists spend years analyzing data before being willing to speculate in public on the significance of 
their findings. We planned on intentionally stepping outside of our “comfort zone” by presenting 
preliminary observations and results at a capstone symposium in the Philippines immediately after 
the expeditionary teams emerged from their field sites. To extend the impact, we wanted policy 
makers and other partners to be included at the symposium, as well as the press and other media. 
Pushing the envelope in this way provided an opportunity to experiment with how to accelerate the 
dissemination and translation of new scientific knowledge for diverse key stakeholders. 
