There is increasing interest in the effectiveness of protected areas (PAs) for supporting populations of wildlife. While there are a number of association studies showing a relationship between protected areas and abundance or trends in wild species, studies with an appropriate counterfactual (what would have happened in the absence of protection) are rare. We use the world’s largest database on waterbird counts (covering 587 species at 21,989 sites globally) to answer three questions: 1) Do PAs have a positive impact on waterbird population trends relative to a counterfactual (this includes cases where a PA has lessened, but not halted, a population decline)?; 2) are PAs performing successfully by maintaining or increasing populations? and 3) what factors contribute to PA impact and performance? We selected 15,703 waterbird populations (here defined as a site species combination), consisting of 311 species at 870 protected sites, where PA designation occurred at least 5 years after the first survey date, and 5 years before the last. We will use this to compare trends before PA designation to those afterwards. We then matched these sites to unprotected sites with similar covariates in the years before PA designation, resulting in a matching dataset of 6,451 populations pairs consisting of 39 species at 769 pairs of protected and unprotected sites. We will use this to compare trends both before and after PA designation and inside and outside of PAs. Our results will shed light on the impact of PA on hundreds of waterbird species, providing much needed evidence regarding PA effectiveness. As PA performance is a sensitive subject and it is important to develop hypotheses before knowing the results (especially for the relatively complex data analysis used in matching protected and unprotected sites), we present a pre-analysis plan. This will ensure that the final paper’s analyses are hypotheses testing, rather than generating, and avoids the risk of, or perception of, data dredging.

There is increasing interest in the effectiveness of protected areas (PAs) for supporting populations of wildlife. While there are a number of association studies showing a relationship between protected areas and abundance or trends in wild species, studies with an appropriate counterfactual (what would have happened in the absence of protection) are rare. We use the world’s largest database on waterbird counts (covering 587 species at 21,989 sites globally) to answer three questions: 1) Do PAs have a positive impact on waterbird population trends relative to a counterfactual (this includes cases where a PA has lessened, but not halted, a population decline)?; 2) are PAs performing successfully by maintaining or increasing populations? and 3) what factors contribute to PA impact and performance? We selected 15,703 waterbird populations (here defined as a site species combination), consisting of 311 species at 870 protected sites, where PA designation occurred at least 5 years after the first survey date, and 5 years before the last. We will use this to compare trends before PA designation to those afterwards. We then matched these sites to unprotected sites with similar covariates in the years before PA designation, resulting in a matching dataset of 6,451 populations pairs consisting of 39 species at 769 pairs of protected and unprotected sites. We will use this to compare trends both before and after PA designation and inside and outside of PAs. Our results will shed light on the impact of PA on hundreds of waterbird species, providing much needed evidence regarding PA effectiveness. As PA performance is a sensitive subject and it is important to develop hypotheses before knowing the results (especially for the relatively complex data analysis used in matching protected and unprotected sites), we present a pre-analysis plan. This will ensure that the final paper’s analyses are hypotheses testing, rather than generating, and avoids the risk of, or perception of, data dredging.

AbstractSpecies are central to ecology and conservation. However, it is the interactions between species that generate the functions on which ecosystems and humans depend. Despite the importance of interactions, we lack an understanding of the risk that their loss poses to ecological communities. Here, we quantify risk as a function of the vulnerability (likelihood of loss) and importance (contribution to network stability in terms of species coexistence) of 4330 mutualistic interactions from 41 empirical pollination and seed dispersal networks across six continents. Remarkably, we find that more vulnerable interactions are also more important: the interactions that contribute most to network stability are those that are most likely to be lost. Furthermore, most interactions tend to have more similar vulnerability and importance across networks than expected by chance, suggesting that vulnerability and importance may be intrinsic properties of interactions, rather than only a function of ecological context. These results provide a starting point for prioritising interactions for conservation in species interaction networks and, in areas lacking network data, could allow interaction properties to be inferred from taxonomy alone.

Although some 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. We devised 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, 3-tier taxonomy of the ways in which projects fail, at the top of which are 6 overarching cause categories that are further divided into midlevel cause categories and specific root causes. We 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 were more likely to be encountered than others and that a small number of root causes were more likely to be encountered by projects implementing particular types of conservation action. Our taxonomy could be used to 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.

International policy is focused on increasing the proportion of the Earth's surface that is protected for nature1,2. Although studies show that protected areas prevent habitat loss3-6, there is a lack of evidence for their effect on species' populations: existing studies are at local scale or use simple designs that lack appropriate controls7-13. Here we explore how 1,506 protected areas have affected the trajectories of 27,055 waterbird populations across the globe using a robust before-after control-intervention study design, which compares protected and unprotected populations in the years before and after protection. We show that the simpler study designs typically used to assess protected area effectiveness (before-after or control-intervention) incorrectly estimate effects for 37-50% of populations-for instance misclassifying positively impacted populations as negatively impacted, and vice versa. Using our robust study design, we find that protected areas have a mixed impact on waterbirds, with a strong signal that areas managed for waterbirds or their habitat are more likely to benefit populations, and a weak signal that larger areas are more beneficial than smaller ones. Calls to conserve 30% of the Earth's surface by 2030 are gathering pace14, but we show that protection alone does not guarantee good biodiversity outcomes. As countries gather to agree the new Global Biodiversity Framework, targets must focus on creating and supporting well-managed protected and conserved areas that measurably benefit populations.

Conservation science is a crisis-oriented discipline focused on reducing human impacts on nature. To explore how the field has changed over the past two decades, we analyzed 3245 applications for oral presentations submitted to the Student Conference on Conservation Science (SCCS) in Cambridge, UK. SCCS has been running every year since 2000, aims for global representation by providing bursaries to early-career conservationists from lower-income countries, and has never had a thematic focus, beyond conservation in the broadest sense. We found that the majority of projects submitted to SCCS were based on primary biological data collected from local scale field studies in the tropics, contrary to established literature which highlights gaps in tropical research. Our results showed a small increase over time in submissions framed around how nature benefits people as well as a small increase in submissions integrating social science. Our findings suggest that students and early-career conservationists could provide pathways to increase availability of data from the tropics and address well-known biases in the published literature towards wealthier countries. We hope this research will motivate efforts to support student projects, ensuring data and results are published and data made publicly available.

AbstractThreats to Antarctic biodiversity are escalating, despite its remoteness and protection under the Antarctic Treaty. Increasing human activity, pollution, biological invasions and the omnipresent impacts of climate change all contribute, and often combine, to exert pressure on Antarctic ecosystems and environments. Here we present a continent-wide assessment of terrestrial biodiversity protection in Antarctica. Despite Antarctic Specially Protected Areas covering less than 2% of Antarctica, 44% of species (including seabirds, plants, lichens and invertebrates) are found in one or more protected areas. However, protection is regionally uneven and biased towards easily detectable and charismatic species like seabirds. Systematic processes to prioritize area protection using the best available data will maximize the likelihood of ensuring long-term protection and conservation of Antarctic biodiversity.

Improving the use of scientific evidence in conservation policy has been a long-standing focus of the conservation community. A plethora of studies have examined conservation science-policy interfaces, including a recent global survey of scientists, policy-makers, and practitioners. This identified a list of top barriers and solutions to evidence use, which have considerable overlap with those identified by other studies conducted over the last few decades. The three top barriers – (i) that conservation is not a political priority, (ii) that there is poor engagement between scientists and decision-makers, and (iii) that conservation problems are complex and uncertain – have often been highlighted in the literature as significant constraints on the use of scientific evidence in conservation policy. There is also repeated identification of the solutions to these barriers. In this perspective, we consider three reasons for this: (1) the barriers are insurmountable, (2) the frequently-proposed solutions are poor, (3) there are implementation challenges to putting solutions into practice. We argue that implementation challenges are most likely to be preventing the solutions being put into practice and that the research agenda for conservation science-policy interfaces needs to move away from identifying barriers and solutions, and towards a detailed investigation of how to overcome these implementation challenges.

Conservation policy decisions can suffer from a lack of evidence, hindering effective decision-making. In nature conservation, studies investigating why policy is often not evidence-informed have tended to focus on Western democracies, with relatively small samples. To understand global variation and challenges better, we established a global survey aimed at identifying top barriers and solutions to the use of conservation science in policy. This obtained the views of 758 people in policy, practice, and research positions from 68 countries across six languages. Here we show that, contrary to popular belief, there is agreement between groups about how to incorporate conservation science into policy, and there is thus room for optimism. Barriers related to the low priority of conservation were considered to be important, while mainstreaming conservation was proposed as a key solution. Therefore, priorities should focus on convincing the public of the importance of conservation as an issue, which will then influence policy-makers to adopt pro-environmental long-term policies.