Quantifying the impact and relevance of scientific research

Qualitative and quantitative methods are being developed to measure the impacts of research on society, but they suffer from serious drawbacks associated with linking a piece of research to its subsequent impacts. We have developed a method to derive impact scores for individual research publications according to their contribution to answering questions of quantified importance to end users of research. To demonstrate the approach, here we evaluate the impacts of research into means of conserving wild bee populations in the UK. For published papers, there is a weak positive correlation between our impact score and the impact factor of the journal. The process identifies publications that provide high quality evidence relating to issues of strong concern. It can also be used to set future research agendas

Organising evidence for environmental management decisions: a '4S' hierarchy.

Making decisions informed by the best-available science is an objective for many organisations managing the environment or natural resources. Yet, available science is still not widely used in environmental policy and practice. We describe a '4S' hierarchy for organising relevant science to inform decisions. This hierarchy has already revolutionised clinical practice. It is beginning to emerge for environmental management, although all four levels need substantial development before environmental decision-makers can reliably and efficiently find the evidence they need. We expose common bypass routes that currently lead to poor or biased representation of scientific knowledge. We argue that the least developed level of the hierarchy is that closest to decision-makers, placing synthesised scientific knowledge into environmental decision support systems.L.V.D. is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (Grant code NE/K015419/1). J.C.W. is funded by the UK Commonwealth Scholarship Commission and the Cambridge Commonwealth, European and International Trust. W.J.S. is funded by Arcadia.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Cell Press/Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2014.09.00

Structured analysis of conservation strategies applied to temporary conservation

Peer reviewe

What Works in Conservation 2021

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

Estimating the risk of species interaction loss in mutualistic communities

Funder: Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 (GB)Funder: Cambridge TrustFunder: Cambridge Depatment of ZoologyFunder: Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment; funder-id: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100008118Funder: Kenneth Miller TrustFunder: ArcadiaInteractions 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

Conservation practice could benefit from routine testing and publication of management outcomes

Effective conservation requires a step change in the way practitioners can contribute to science and can have access to research outputs. The journal Conservation Evidence was established in 2004 to help practitioners surmount several obstacles they face when attempting to document the effects of their conservation actions scientifically. It is easily and freely accessible online. It is free to publish in and it enables global communication of the effects of practical trials and experiments, which are virtually impossible to get published in most scientific journals. The driving force behind Conservation Evidence is the need to generate and share scientific information about the effects of interventions

Giving stakeholders a voice in governance: Biodiversity priorities for New Zealand's agriculture

Mainstreaming biodiversity across government and society is recognised by international policy as critical to achieving positive conservation outcomes. With ‘participatory governance’ increasingly being applied to achieve collective action in conservation, there are growing calls to critically review such processes to capture their complexity and manage for emergent outcomes. This paper critically reviews a case study, aiming to give a broad range of stakeholders a voice in setting biodiversity priorities for New Zealand's agricultural landscape, in relation to four principles for knowledge co-production in sustainability: context-based, pluralistic, goal-orientated and interactive. Aiming to facilitate an inclusive but rapid participation process, while not overburdening those willing to participate, three pathways for engagement were offered. Stakeholder participants were recruited from public, private and civic sectors involved in managing New Zealand's farmland biodiversity. An initial scoping exercise helped elevate biodiversity groups and management actions distinct to New Zealand's social and environmental context. Online surveys then gave stakeholders, from a diverse range of roles and sectors, a nationwide voice to express their own biodiversity interests and needs; these were reviewed by an advisor panel to reach consensus on final priorities that reflected the biodiversity outcomes that matter most to stakeholders involved in managing New Zealand's agricultural landscape and the management practices they considered most relevant to achieving those outcomes. This knowledge co-production process delivered multiple gains that would not have been achieved had a more traditional science-based process been applied, such as wide stakeholder engagement, identification of a tangible starting point, mitigation of bias or conflict risks, enhanced researcher and practitioner capabilities and a shared understanding of the opportunities and challenges for future development. Institutes addressing conservation challenges within local contexts need to: be ‘boundary-spanning’ to manage cross-scale influences and enable desired conservation behaviours; plan explicitly for the substantial effort required to overcome existing power hierarchies and facilitate transparent and structured decision processes that deliver social justice; better capture the relational values of nature to more successfully leverage peoples’ connection to nature in conservation policies and practices; and incorporate wider environmental (e.g. biosecurity), social, economic and political considerations. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article

Policies for ecological intensification of crop production

Ecological intensification aims to increase crop productivity by enhancing biodiversity and associated ecosystem services, while minimizing the use of synthetic inputs and cropland expansion. Policies to promote ecological intensification have emerged in different countries, but they are still scarce and vary widely across regions. Here, we propose ten policy targets that governments can follow for ecological intensification

Moving from frugivory to seed dispersal: incorporating the functional outcomes of interactions in plant-frugivore networks

1. There is growing interest in understanding the functional outcomes of species interactions in ecological networks. For many mutualistic networks, including pollination and seed dispersal networks, interactions are generally sampled by recording animal foraging visits to plants. However, these visits may not reflect actual pollination or seed dispersal events, despite these typically being the ecological processes of interest. 2. Frugivorous animals can act as seed dispersers, by swallowing entire fruits and dispersing their seeds, or as pulp peckers or seed predators, by pecking fruits to consume pieces of pulp or seeds. These processes have opposing consequences for plant reproductive success. Therefore, equating visitation with seed dispersal could lead to biased inferences about the ecology, evolution and conservation of seed dispersal mutualisms. 3. Here we use natural history information on the functional outcomes of pairwise bird-plant interactions to examine changes in the structure of seven European plant-frugivore visitation networks after non-mutualistic interactions (pulp-pecking and seed predation) have been removed. Following existing knowledge of the contrasting structures of mutualistic and antagonistic networks, we hypothesised a number of changes following interaction removal, such as increased nestedness and lower specialisation. 4. Non-mutualistic interactions with pulp peckers and seed predators occurred in all seven networks, accounting for 21–48% of all interactions and 6–24% of total interaction frequency. When non-mutualistic interactions were removed, there were significant increases in network-level metrics such as connectance and nestedness, while robustness decreased. These changes were generally small, homogenous and driven by decreases in network size. Conversely, changes in species-level metrics were more variable and sometimes large, with significant decreases in plant degree, interaction frequency, specialisation and resilience to animal extinctions, and significant increases in frugivore species strength. 5. Visitation data can overestimate the actual frequency of seed dispersal services in plant-frugivore networks. We show here that incorporating natural history information on the functions of species interactions can bring us closer to understanding the processes and functions operating in ecological communities. Our categorical approach lays the foundation for future work quantifying functional interaction outcomes along a mutualism–antagonism continuum, as documented in other frugivore faunas.B.I.S. was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council as part of the Cambridge Earth System Science NERC DTP (NE/L002507/1). J.P.G.‐V. was funded by an Individual Fellowship from the Marie Sklodowska‐Curie Actions (H2020‐MSCA‐IF‐2014‐656572: MobileLinks). D.G. was funded by a grant from the Spanish MinECo (CGL2017‐82847‐P). W.J.S. is funded by Arcadia. N.F. thanks the administration of the Białowieża National Park, the forestry administrations of Białowieża, Hajnówka and Browsk and Polish authorities (Ministry of Environment, GDOS and RDOS) for the permissions to work in Białowieża Forest. J.A. was supported by the German Federal Foundation for Environment (DBU) and by the German Academic Exchange Service in the framework of a post‐doctorate fellowship grant (DAAD, No 91568794). L.V.D. was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (grants NE/K015419/1 and NE/N014472/1)

Eight problems with literature reviews and how to fix them.

Traditional approaches to reviewing literature may be susceptible to bias and result in incorrect decisions. This is of particular concern when reviews address policy- and practice-relevant questions. Systematic reviews have been introduced as a more rigorous approach to synthesizing evidence across studies; they rely on a suite of evidence-based methods aimed at maximizing rigour and minimizing susceptibility to bias. Despite the increasing popularity of systematic reviews in the environmental field, evidence synthesis methods continue to be poorly applied in practice, resulting in the publication of syntheses that are highly susceptible to bias. Recognizing the constraints that researchers can sometimes feel when attempting to plan, conduct and publish rigorous and comprehensive evidence syntheses, we aim here to identify major pitfalls in the conduct and reporting of systematic reviews, making use of recent examples from across the field. Adopting a 'critical friend' role in supporting would-be systematic reviews and avoiding individual responses to police use of the 'systematic review' label, we go on to identify methodological solutions to mitigate these pitfalls. We then highlight existing support available to avoid these issues and call on the entire community, including systematic review specialists, to work towards better evidence syntheses for better evidence and better decisions