Testing a novel approach for synthesising the evidence of the effectiveness of conservation interventions

Considerable effort and money has been devoted to determining the ecological consequences of a wide range of interventions, which has resulted in an extensive literature. However, research shows that practitioners only rarely use this literature when making decisions as to which intervention to implement. Furthermore, many accepted beliefs in conservation practice are actually incorrect. Scientific results are traditionally published in academic journals. However, it is often difficult for practitioners to extract the pertinent information from these. The major problems are that most practitioners do not have access to the Web of Science or equivalent scientific search engines, it is often difficult to target the search for conservation interventions without producing vast numbers of irrelevent titles and many practitioners do not have the training to extract the conservation message from academic papers. Evidence-based medicine has revolutionised medical practice in that the collection, review, and dissemination of the evidence now underpins most medical practice. We suggest that conservation would benefit from a similar revolution and propose that evidence-based conservation should become a standard approach. In this model we envisage practitioners having easy access to summaries of the literature, that they would monitor the effectiveness of some interventions for which the evidence is weak or ambiguous, that there would be reviews and meta analyses where there are numerous studies relating to one issue, and there would be synopses summarising the evidence for the major interventions. This proposal seeks to provide an open access database of the majority of the papers relating to the consequences for birds of conservation interventions. Syntheses of the consequences of a wide range of interventions will be a key output. Full use of the output will also require a change in approaches to conservation. The involvement of all the major organisations involved in bird conservation (BirdLife International - a partnership of over 100 national global bird conservation organisations, British Trust for Ornithology, Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Natural England, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Scottish Natural Heritage and World Conservation Monitoring Centre) will both ensure that the project is as required by practitioners but will also ensure that the results will be widely used both in the UK and internationally. Training in the use of evidence-based conservation will be provided through workshops in the UK, Africa and Asia and this work will also be promoted through stands at UK and international meetings. The longer term objective is to change global conservation practice so that the decisions effecting biodiversity are routinely based upon the scientific literature. The expectation is that we can build upon the work and experience of this project to expand it to incorporate all the major aspect of conservation in collaboration with a wide range of other organisation so that the use of evidence in decision making becomes standard practice This proposal would allow us to make a substantial step forward in achieving our objective of reforming global conservation practice.