Nine years of the Red Book Challenge conservation education in Southern Madagascar: What we have learned
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Red Book Challenge Conservation Education Madagascar is a small-scale, arts-based, conservation education initiative founded in 2012 by two Lemur catta researchers working in the Berenty Reserve and incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 2022. The target demographic is children and adults living in Southern Madagascar. The Red Book Challenge program initially consisted of providing supplementary conservation education through classroom visits at the elementary schools in Berenty village. The school children created small conservation booklets with red covers, giving the project its name. Today, the program has expanded to include the village of Besakoa Ambany and the city of Fort Dauphin, while remaining a small-scale program. To date, the Red Book Challenge has completed seven outreach projects aimed at generating goodwill in the local community, community development, and conservation education. This retrospective analysis functions as a formative evaluation of the feasibility of future projects. This paper will focus on four projects that fall under the category of conservation education: (1) Using films to promote conservation topics (2) field trips to observe lemurs (3) a Malagasy-run conservation club, and (4) a coloring book. These projects have been funded through small grants from the International Conservation Fund of Canada, and private donations. This paper includes the Red Book Challenge's history, results from the participant surveys, and the successes and failures in each stage of our work. Six shifts in thinking occurred: (1) use of Malagasy talent to create educational conservation films (2) more formal assessment before and after field trips (3) improvement of recruitment, training and supervision of staff to keep the conservation club self-sufficient (4) enlistment of Malagasy illustrators and adaptation of environmentally friendly printing practices for the coloring books (5) disseminate study outcomes to international community though publication (6) reframe the program from spare-time volunteer work to full-time research work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".