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Funder: Stichting Ave Fenix Europa, Funder: Arcadia Fund; Id: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100012088, Funder: MAVA Foundation; Id: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100013324, Funder: David and Claudia Harding Foundation, Funder: Research England, Species reliant on both the terrestrial and marine realms present a challenge for conventional species distribution models (SDMs). For such species, standard single���realm SDMs may omit key information that could result in decreased model accuracy and performance. Existing approaches to habitat suitability modeling typically do not effectively combine information from multiple realms; this methodological gap can ultimately hamper management efforts for groups such as seabirds, seals, and turtles. This study, for the first time, jointly incorporates both terrestrial information and marine information into a single species distribution model framework. We do this by sampling nearby marine conditions for a given terrestrial point and vice versa using parameters set by each species��� mean maximum foraging distance and then use standard SDM methods to generate habitat suitability predictions; therefore, our method does not rely on post hoc combination of several different models. Using three seabird species with very different ecologies, we investigate whether this new multi���realm approach can improve our ability to identify suitable habitats for these species. Results show that incorporating terrestrial information into marine SDMs, or vice versa, generally improves model performance, sometimes drastically. However, there is considerable variability between species in the level of improvement as well as in the particular method that produces the most improvement. Our approach provides a repeatable and transparent method to combine information from multiple ecological realms in a single SDM framework. Important advantages over existing solutions include the opportunity to, firstly, easily combine terrestrial and marine information for species that forage large distances inland or out to sea and, secondly, consider interactions between terrestrial and marine variables.

The widely held assumption that any important scientific information would be available in English underlies the underuse of non-English-language science across disciplines. However, non-English-language science is expected to bring unique and valuable scientific information, especially in disciplines where the evidence is patchy, and for emergent issues where synthesising available evidence is an urgent challenge. Yet such contribution of non-English-language science to scientific communities and the application of science is rarely quantified. Here, we show that non-English-language studies provide crucial evidence for informing global biodiversity conservation. By screening 419,679 peer-reviewed papers in 16 languages, we identified 1,234 non-English-language studies providing evidence on the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation interventions, compared to 4,412 English-language studies identified with the same criteria. Relevant non-English-language studies are being published at an increasing rate in 6 out of the 12 languages where there were a sufficient number of relevant studies. Incorporating non-English-language studies can expand the geographical coverage (i.e., the number of 2° × 2° grid cells with relevant studies) of English-language evidence by 12% to 25%, especially in biodiverse regions, and taxonomic coverage (i.e., the number of species covered by the relevant studies) by 5% to 32%, although they do tend to be based on less robust study designs. Our results show that synthesising non-English-language studies is key to overcoming the widespread lack of local, context-dependent evidence and facilitating evidence-based conservation globally. We urge wider disciplines to rigorously reassess the untapped potential of non-English-language science in informing decisions to address other global challenges. Please see the Supporting information files for Alternative Language Abstracts., A survey of 419,680 peer-reviewed papers in 16 languages reveals that non-English-language studies can expand geographical (by 12-25%) and taxonomic (by 5-32%) coverage of English-language evidence on the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation interventions, especially in biodiverse regions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous impact on almost all aspects of human society and endeavor; the natural world and its conservation have not been spared. Through a process of expert consultation, we identified and categorized, into 19 themes and 70 subthemes, the ways in which biodiversity and its conservation have been or could be affected by the pandemic globally. Nearly 60% of the effects have been broadly negative. Subsequently, we created a compendium of all themes and subthemes, each with explanatory text, and in August 2020 a diverse group of experienced conservationists with expertise from across sectors and geographies assessed each subtheme for its likely impact on biodiversity conservation globally. The 9 subthemes ranked highest all have a negative impact. These were, in rank order, governments sidelining the environment during their economic recovery, reduced wildlife-based tourism income, increased habitat destruction, reduced government funding, increased plastic and other solid waste pollution, weakening of nature-friendly regulations and their enforcement, increased illegal harvest of wild animals, reduced philanthropy, and threats to survival of conservation organizations. In combination, these impacts present a worrying future of increased threats to biodiversity conservation but reduced capacity to counter them. The highest ranking positive impact, at 10, was the beneficial impact of wildlife-trade restrictions. More optimistically, among impacts ranked 11-20, 6 were positive and 4 were negative. We hope our assessment will draw attention to the impacts of the pandemic and, thus, improve the conservation community's ability to respond to such threats in the future.La pandemia de COVID-19 ha tenido un impacto enorme sobre casi todos los aspectos de la sociedad humana y sus proyectos; el mundo natural y su conservación no han sido la excepción. Por medio de un proceso de consultas a expertos, identificamos y categorizamos en 19 temas y 70 subtemas las maneras en las que la biodiversidad y su conservación han sido o podrían ser afectadas mundialmente por la pandemia. Casi el 60% de los efectos han sido claramente negativos. Posteriormente, creamos un compendio de todos los temas y subtemas, cada uno con textos explicativos, para que en agosto de 2020 un grupo diverso de conservacionistas experimentados con conocimiento de todos los sectores y geografías evaluara cada subtema de acuerdo con su probabilidad de impactar sobre la conservación de la biodiversidad en todo el mundo. Los nueve subtemas con la clasificación más alta tienen un impacto negativo. Estos temas son, en orden de clasificación: los gobiernos dejando de lado al ambiente durante su recuperación económica, reducción de los ingresos basados en el turismo de fauna, incremento en la destrucción de hábitat, financiamiento reducido del gobierno, aumento de la contaminación por plásticos y otros desechos sólidos, debilitamiento de las regulaciones en pro de la naturaleza y su aplicación, incremento en la captura ilegal de animales, disminución de la filantropía y amenazas para la supervivencia de las organizaciones de conservación. La combinación de estos impactos representa un futuro preocupante lleno de amenazas para la conservación de la biodiversidad y una capacidad reducida para contrarrestarlas. El impacto positivo con la clasificación más alta, el 10, fue el impacto benéfico de las restricciones en el mercado de fauna. De manera más optimista, entre los impactos clasificados de los lugares del 11 al 20, seis fueron positivos y cuatro fueron negativos. Esperamos que nuestra evaluación enfoque la atención hacia los impactos de la pandemia y así mejore la habilidad de la comunidad conservacionista para responder a tales amenazas en el futuro. Importancia Relativa de los Impactos de la Pandemia de COVID-19 sobre la Conservación Mundial de la Biodiversidad.

There are severe problems with the decision-making processes currently widely used, leading to ineffective use of evidence, faulty decisions, wasting of resources and the erosion of public and political support. In this book an international team of experts provide solutions. The transformation suggested includes rethinking how evidence is assessed, combined, communicated and used in decision-making; using effective methods when asking experts to make judgements (i.e. avoiding just asking an expert or a group of experts!); using a structured process for making decisions that incorporate the evidence and having effective processes for learning from actions. In each case, the specific problem with decision making is described with a range of practical solutions. Adopting this approach to decision-making requires societal change so detailed suggestions are made for transforming organisations, governments, businesses, funders and philanthropists. The practical suggestions include twelve downloadable checklists. The vision of the authors is to transform conservation so it is more effective, more cost-efficient, learns from practice and is more attractive to funders. However, the lessons of this important book go well beyond conservation to decision-makers in any field.

Conservation practitioners are increasingly interested in the lessons gained through failure. While other sectors have made significant progress in learning from failure, there is currently limited consensus on how a similar transition could best be achieved in conservation, and what is required to facilitate this. One of the key enabling conditions for other sectors is a widely accepted and standardized classification system for identifying and analyzing root causes of failure. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive taxonomy of root causes of failure affecting conservation projects. To develop this, we solicited examples of real-life conservation efforts that were deemed to have failed in some way, identified their underlying root causes of failure and used these to develop a generic, three-tier taxonomy of the ways in which projects fail. We subsequently tested the taxonomy by asking conservation practitioners to use it to classify the causes of failure for conservation efforts they had been involved in. No significant gaps or redundancies were identified during this testing phase. We then analyzed the frequency that particular root causes were encountered by projects within this test sample, which suggested that some root causes may be more likely to be reported in projects implementing particular types of conservation action, while others may frequently occur across a range of different project types. We propose that this taxonomy could be used to help improve identification, analysis and subsequent learning from failed conservation efforts, address some of the barriers that currently limit the ability of conservation practitioners to learn from failure, and contribute to establishing an effective culture of learning from failure within conservation. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Conservationists have long sought to reduce consumer demand for overexploited wildlife products. More recently, health practitioners and others have begun calling for reductions in the wildlife trade to reduce the risk of pandemics. Despite this broadening interest, most wildlife-focused demand reduction campaigns have lacked rigorous evaluations and thus their impacts remain unknown. There is thus an urgent need to review the evidence from beyond conservation science to inform future demand-reduction efforts. We searched for systematic reviews of interventions that aimed to reduce consumer demand for harmful products (e.g., cigarettes and illicit drugs). In total, 41 systematic reviews were assessed, and their data extracted. Mass-media campaigns and incentive programs were, on average, ineffective. While advertising bans, social marketing and location bans were promising, there was insufficient robust evidence to draw firm conclusions. In contrast, the evidence for the effectiveness of risk warnings and appeals to norms was stronger, with some caveats.

Author-level metrics are a widely used measure of scientific success. The h-index and its variants measure publication output (number of publications) and research impact (number of citations). They are often used to influence decisions, such as allocating funding or jobs. Here, we argue that the emphasis on publication output and impact hinders scientific progress in the fields of ecology and evolution because it disincentivizes two fundamental practices: generating impactful (and therefore often long-term) datasets and sharing data. We describe a new author-level metric, the data-index, which values both dataset output (number of datasets) and impact (number of data-index citations), so promotes generating and sharing data as a result. We discuss how it could be implemented and provide user guidelines. The data-index is designed to complement other metrics of scientific success, as scientific contributions are diverse and our value system should reflect that both for the benefit of scientific progress and to create a value system that is more equitable, diverse, and inclusive. Future work should focus on promoting other scientific contributions, such as communicating science, informing policy, mentoring other scientists, and providing open-access code and tools.

This book provides an assessment of the effectiveness of 2526 conservation interventions based on summarized scientific evidence. The 2021 edition contains substantial new material on bat conservation, terrestrial mammal conservation and marine and freshwater mammals, thus completing the evidence for all mammal species categories. Other chapters cover practical global conservation of primates, amphibians, bats, birds, forests, peatlands, subtidal benthic invertebrates, shrublands and heathlands, as well as the conservation of European farmland biodiversity and some aspects of enhancing natural pest control, enhancing soil fertility, management of captive animals and control of freshwater invasive species. It contains key results from the summarized evidence for each conservation intervention and an assessment of the effectiveness of each by international expert panels. The accompanying website www.conservationevidence.com describes each of the studies individually, and provides full references. This is the sixth author-approved edition of What Works in Conservation, which is revised on an annual basis.

Publisher's version (útgefin grein), Phenological changes in response to climate change have been recorded in many taxa, but the population-level consequences of these changes are largely unknown. If phenological change influences demography, it may underpin the changes in range size and distribution that have been associated with climate change in many species. Over the last century, Icelandic black-tailed godwits (Limosa limosa islandica) have increased 10-fold in numbers, and their breeding range has expanded throughout lowland Iceland, but the environmental and demographic drivers of this expansion remain unknown. Here, we explore the potential for climate-driven shifts in phenology to influence demography and range expansion. In warmer springs, Icelandic black-tailed godwits lay their clutches earlier, resulting in advances in hatching dates in those years. Early hatching is beneficial as population-wide tracking of marked individuals shows that chick recruitment to the adult population is greater for early hatched individuals. Throughout the last century, this population has expanded into progressively colder breeding areas in which hatch dates are later, but temperatures have increased throughout Iceland since the 1960s. Using these established relationships between temperature, hatching dates and recruitment, we show that these warming trends have the potential to have fueled substantial increases in recruitment throughout Iceland, and thus to have contributed to local population growth and expansion across the breeding range. The demographic consequences of temperature-mediated phenological changes, such as the advances in lay dates and increased recruitment associated with early hatching reported here, may therefore be key processes in driving population size and range changes in response to climate change., We thank Lilja Jóhannesdóttir, Borgný Katrínardóttir, Verónica Méndez, Sara Pardal, Juan Carlos Illera, Graham Appleton and Ruth Croger for help in the field, Catriona Morrison and Maria Dias for help with analyses, members of Farlington Ringing Group for chick ringing in Iceland and volunteer observers across the range for reporting ringed godwits. Funding was provided by NERC (NE/H008527/1), Arcadia, The Icelandic Research Fund (130412‐051) and FCT (SFRH/BPD/91527/2012). The Icelandic Meteorological Office provided the temperature data.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this year has further highlighted the vulnerability of global food security to geopolitical disruption of supply chains. As members of the Biosecurity Research Initiative at St Catharine’s (BioRISC) at the University of Cambridge, UK, we argue that necessary transport route changes must be accompanied by effective biosecurity measures against invasive species and pathogens.

Efforts to tackle the current biodiversity crisis need to be as efficient and effective as possible given chronic underfunding. To inform decision‐makers of the most effective conservation actions, it is important to identify biases and gaps in the conservation literature to prioritize future evidence generation. We used the Conservation Evidence database to assess the state of the global literature that tests conservation actions for amphibians and birds. For the studies in the database, we investigated their spatial and taxonomic extent and distribution across biomes, effectiveness metrics, and study designs. Studies were heavily concentrated in Western Europe and North America for birds and particularly for amphibians, and temperate forest and grassland biomes were highly represented relative to their percentage of land coverage. Studies that used the most reliable study designs ‐ before‐after control‐impact and randomized controlled trials ‐ were the most geographically restricted and scarce in the evidence base. There were negative spatial relationships between the numbers of studies and the numbers of threatened and data‐deficient species worldwide. Taxonomic biases and gaps were apparent for amphibians and birds–some entire orders were absent from the evidence base–whereas others were poorly represented relative to the proportion of threatened species they contained. Metrics used to evaluate effectiveness of conservation actions were often inconsistent between studies, potentially making them less directly comparable and evidence synthesis more difficult. Testing conservation actions on threatened species outside Western Europe, North America and Australasia should be prioritized. Standardizing metrics and improving the rigor of study designs used to test conservation actions would also improve the quality of the evidence base for synthesis and decision‐making.

Funder: Arcadia; Id: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100012088, Funder: MAVA, Funder: The David and Claudia Harding Foundation, Making effective decisions in conservation requires a broad and robust evidence base describing the likely outcomes of potential actions to draw on. Such evidence is typically generated from experiments or trials that evaluate the effectiveness of actions, but for many actions evidence is missing or incomplete. We discuss how evidence can be generated by incorporating experiments into conservation practice. This is likely to be most efficient if opportunities for carrying out informative, well‐designed experiments are identified at an early stage during conservation management planning. We consider how to navigate a way between the stringent requirements of statistical textbooks and the complexities of carrying out ecological experiments in the real world by considering practical approaches to the key issues of replication, controls and randomization. We suggest that routinely sharing the results of experiments could increase both the value for money and effectiveness of conservation practice. We argue that with early planning and a small additional input of effort, important new learning can be gained during the implementation of many conservation actions.

The accompanying website www.conservationevidence.com describes each of the studies individually, and provides full references. This is the fifth edition of What Works in Conservation, which is revised on an annual basis.

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Sutherland, W.J., Alvarez‐Castaneda, S.T., Amano, T., Ambrosini, R., Atkinson, P., Baxter, J.M., Bond, A.L., Boon, P.J., Buchanan, K.L., Barlow, J., Bogliani, G., Bragg, O.M., Burgman, M., Cadotte, M.W., Calver, M., Cooke, S.J., Corlett, R.T., Devictor, V., Ewen, J.G., Fisher, M., Freeman, G., Game, E., Godley, B.J., Gortazar, C., Hartley, I.R., Hawksworth, D.L., Hobson, K.A., Lu, M.‐L., Martin‐Lopez, B., Ma, K., Machado, A., Maes, D., Mangiacotti, M., McCafferty, D.J., Melfi, V., Molur, S., Moore, A.J., Murphy, S.D., Norris, D., van Oudenhoven, A.P., Powers, J., Rees, E.C., Schwartz, M.W., Storch, I. and Wordley, C. (2020), Ensuring tests of conservation interventions build on existing literature. Conservation Biology, 34: 781-783, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13555. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving. The attached file is the final approved author manuscript version, you are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it.

Interactions between species generate the functions on which ecosystems and humans depend. However, we lack an understanding of the risk that interaction loss poses to ecological communities. Here, we quantify the risk of interaction loss for 4,330 species interactions from 41 empirical pollination and seed dispersal networks across 6 continents. We estimate risk as a function of interaction vulnerability to extinction (likelihood of loss) and contribution to network feasibility, a measure of how much an interaction helps a community tolerate environmental perturbations. Remarkably, we find that more vulnerable interactions have higher contributions to network feasibility. Furthermore, interactions tend to have more similar vulnerability and contribution to feasibility across networks than expected by chance, suggesting that vulnerability and feasibility contribution may be intrinsic properties of interactions, rather than only a function of ecological context. These results may provide a starting point for prioritising interactions for conservation in species interaction networks in the future., A study of 4,330 species interactions from 41 empirical pollination and seed dispersal networks across six continents reveals that species interactions which are most vulnerable to extinction are also the most important for ecological community stability; moreover, vulnerable interactions that are important for stability tend to be important and vulnerable wherever they occur.