Resources / Conservation Interventions
For Managers and Policy Makers

What Works in Conservation

The Conservation Evidence project:


The Conservation Evidence project has four parts, all of which are available from our website:

1. An ever-expanding searchable database of over 4,200 summaries of previously published scientific papers, reports, reviews or systematic reviews that document the effects of interventions.

2. Synopses of the evidence captured in part 1) relating to particular species groups, habitats or conservation issues. Synopses bring together the evidence for all possible interventions. Synopses are also available to purchase in printed book form.

3. What Works in Conservation provides an assessment of the effectiveness of interventions based on available evidence. It contains both the key messages from the evidence for each conservation intervention from the relevant synopses, and an assessment of the effectiveness of each intervention by expert panels.

4. An online, open access journal Conservation Evidence that publishes new pieces of research on the effects of conservation management interventions. All our papers are written by, or in conjunction with, those who carried out the conservation
work and include some monitoring of its effects. Alongside this project, the Centre for Evidence-Based Conservation (www.cebc.bangor.ac.uk) and the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence (www.environmentalevidence.org) carry out and compile systematic reviews of evidence on the effectiveness of particular conservation interventions. We recommend carrying out a systematic review, which is more comprehensive than our summaries of evidence, when decisions have to be made with particularly important consequences. Systematic reviews are included in the Conservation Evidence database.

 

Book: Sutherland, W.J., Dicks, L.V., Ockendon, N., & Smith, R.K. (2015) What Works in Conservation. Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, UK. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0060

The book has been created to help you make decisions about practical conservation management by providing an assessment, from the available scientific evidence, of what works and what does not work in conservation. It also tells you if no evidence has been found about whether or not a conservation intervention is effective.

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