Poor availability of context-specific evidence hampers decision-making in conservation
Christie, AP; Amano, T; Martin, PA; et al.Petrovan, SO; Shackelford, GE; Simmons, B; Smith, RK; Williams, DR; Wordley, CFR; Sutherland, WJ
Date: 1 July 2020
Journal
Biological Conservation
Publisher
Elsevier
Publisher DOI
Abstract
Evidence-based conservation relies on reliable and relevant evidence. Practitioners
often prefer locally relevant studies whose results are more likely to be transferable to
the context of planned conservation interventions. To quantify the availability of relevant
evidence for amphibian and bird conservation we reviewed Conservation ...
Evidence-based conservation relies on reliable and relevant evidence. Practitioners
often prefer locally relevant studies whose results are more likely to be transferable to
the context of planned conservation interventions. To quantify the availability of relevant
evidence for amphibian and bird conservation we reviewed Conservation Evidence, a
database of quantitative tests of conservation interventions. Studies were geographically
clustered, and few locally conducted studies were found in Western sub-Saharan Africa,
Russia, South East Asia, and Eastern South America. Globally there were extremely low
densities of studies per intervention - fewer than one study within 2,000km of a given
location. The availability of relevant evidence was extremely low when we restricted
studies to those studying biomes or taxonomic orders containing high percentages of
threatened species, compared to the most frequently studied biomes and taxonomic
orders. Further constraining the evidence by study design showed that only 17-20% of
amphibian and bird studies used reliable designs. Our results highlight the paucity of
evidence on the effectiveness of conservation interventions, and the disparity in
evidence for local contexts that are frequently studied and those where conservation
needs are greatest. Addressing the serious global shortfall in context-specific evidence
requires a step change in the frequency of testing conservation interventions, greater
use of reliable study designs and standardized metrics, and methodological advances to
analyze patchy evidence bases.
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's licence is described as © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/).