Humanity’s impact on the environment is increasing, as are strategies to conserve biodiversity,
but a lack of understanding about how interventions affect ecological and conservation
outcomes hampers decision-making. Time-series are often used to assess impacts, but
ecologists tend to compare average values from before to after an ...
Humanity’s impact on the environment is increasing, as are strategies to conserve biodiversity,
but a lack of understanding about how interventions affect ecological and conservation
outcomes hampers decision-making. Time-series are often used to assess impacts, but
ecologists tend to compare average values from before to after an impact; overlooking the
potential for the intervention to elicit a change in trend. Without methods that allow for a range
of responses, erroneous conclusions can be drawn. This is especially so for large, multi-time-series datasets which are increasingly available. Drawing on literature in other disciplines and
pioneering work in ecology, we present a standardised framework to robustly assesses how
interventions, like natural disasters or conservation policies, affect ecological time series.