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There is growing awareness across many branches of science of the need to decolonize research practices and curricula (Aikenhead, 2006; Radcliffe, 2017), and the fields of ecology and conservation are no exception (Baker et al., 2019). Although conservation scientists and practitioners from the Global North are gradually waking up to the fact that local knowledge and agency––including that of Indigenous people––are essential for social justice and to achieving conservation outcomes, the road to decolonizing conservation science remains a long one (Baker et al., 2019). As a discipline, conservation has a long colonial history and remains heavily dominated by institutions in the Global North when it comes to publications, funding, and research networks (Maas et al., 2021).

In 2008, a group of conservation scientists compiled a list of 100 priority questions for the conservation of the world's biodiversity. However, now almost a decade later, no one has yet published a study gauging how much progress has been made in addressing these 100 high-priority questions in the peer-reviewed literature. We took a first step toward reexamining the 100 questions to identify key knowledge gaps that remain. Through a combination of a questionnaire and a literature review, we evaluated each question on the basis of 2 criteria: relevance and effort. We defined highly relevant questions as those that - if answered - would have the greatest impact on global biodiversity conservation and quantified effort based on the number of review publications addressing a particular question, which we used as a proxy for research effort. Using this approach, we identified a set of questions that, despite being perceived as highly relevant, have been the focus of relatively few review publications over the past 10 years. These questions covered a broad range of topics but predominantly tackled 3 major themes: conservation and management of freshwater ecosystems, role of societal structures in shaping interactions between people and the environment, and impacts of conservation interventions. We believe these questions represent important knowledge gaps that have received insufficient attention and may need to be prioritized in future research.