Determining the most effective conservation actions for species

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Species recovery depends upon application of effective conservation actions.Determining which conservation actions to apply to conserve a speciesrequires an understanding the species' biology, ecology, threats and howdifferent conservation actions impact species and their threats. However, formany species there is no information on what actions are the effective forconserving them (Christie et al. 2020; Junker et al. 2020). For highlythreatened and rapidly declining species, there is often not enough time orenough individuals left to test the effectiveness of actions. Where theinformation on effective conservation actions is absent, species responsesare assumed to be the same as similar species, but this is not always trueand can have cause further declines. Conservation practitioners also often donot have time to publish the impact of their actions; so key evidence is oftenmissed. This project aims to gather all available evidence on speciesconservation action effectiveness in order to determine (1) what predicts theeffectiveness of conservation actions for different species and groups ofspecies across a range of taxa, (2) whether/when inference from similarspecies is appropriate and which information is needed to determine this and(3) use the derived models and variables to predict the most suitableconservation actions for a wide range of species which currently lackinformation on effective conservation actions for the first time. The known andpredicted effective conservation actions for species would then be comparedagainst in-place and needed actions identified to determine where these differand why.