Building a tool to overcome barriers in research-implementation spaces: The Conservation Evidence database
Introduction
Despite efforts to conserve it, biodiversity is being lost at an alarming and increasing rate (Dirzo et al., 2014; Ripple et al., 2017). Research on the effectiveness of conservation interventions is critical to ensure conservation efforts are beneficial, efficient, and not creating additional harms (Cardinale et al., 2012). The number of publications evaluating the impact of conservation-relevant interventions is growing annually, but the lessons learned are often not employed in management decisions or policy (Sutherland et al., 2004; Young and Van Aarde, 2011).
This problem has been widely conceptualized as a “research-implementation gap” (Anon, 2007; Knight et al., 2008; Westgate et al., 2018, see Glossary in Appendix). More recently, it has been reconceptualized as an issue within a series of “research-implementation spaces”: arenas in which various stakeholders and interest groups interact, collaborate and learn together (Toomey et al., 2017). This concept explicitly recognizes the existing connections between research and practice rather than implying there are voids between research and practice that need to be filled, as well as the broader context in which scientific knowledge is produced and utilized.
Within research-practice and research-policy spaces, several clearly defined barriers limit collaboration and coproduction of knowledge (Roux et al., 2006; van Kerkhoff and Lebel, 2015; Table 1). These include communication barriers (e.g. length, linguistic and statistical complexity of scientific articles), financial barriers (e.g. studies hidden behind paywalls), relevance barriers (research often lacks direct relevance to practitioners or policy-makers), synthesis barriers (an overwhelming volume of unsynthesized scientific literature) and socio-political barriers (e.g. motivated skepticism of information that challenges existing worldviews).
Evidence synthesis is fundamental to overcoming some of these barriers, increasing the flow of ideas within research-implementation spaces, and ultimately helping researchers, practitioners and policy-makers navigate towards the common goal of conserving biodiversity. Evidence synthesis methods aim to locate, collate, and synthesize relevant information, usually from published literature. They range from unsystematic, ad hoc literature reviews, to comprehensive systematic reviews, and even reviews of reviews (Collins et al., 2015). However, these existing approaches have shortfalls. Traditional literature reviews can be subjective, liable to bias and methodologically opaque (Collins et al., 2015; Haddaway et al., 2015). Systematic reviews are designed to reduce those issues, but can be expensive and time-consuming (Borah et al., 2017; Haddaway and Westgate, 2019). Therefore, they are not always possible in conservation, where resources are limited (Soulé, 1985; Gerber, 2016). The intended audience of reviews and systematic reviews sometimes face communication barriers (e.g. Cochrane Clinical Answers are needed as a “readable, digestible” entry point to medical Cochrane Reviews; Cochrane Library, 2019) and financial barriers (e.g. paywalls, although Environmental Evidence provides open access systematic reviews).
To address these issues, we have developed a method to rapidly synthesize evidence across entire subject areas (comprising tens or hundreds of related review questions), whilst being transparent, objective and minimizing bias. Target end users (i.e. researchers, practitioners and policy-makers) are actively involved in the synthesis process. Uniquely, our subject-wide evidence syntheses (Sutherland and Wordley, 2018) are part of a broader discipline-wide project, pooling resources to increase speed and cost-effectiveness. The ultimate output of this process is the freely accessible, plain-English Conservation Evidence database, which contains evidence for the effects of conservation interventions. The database is complemented by other tools in the Conservation Evidence toolbox (e.g. the journal Conservation Evidence and Evidence Champions). Together, these tools are designed to overcome or lower barriers within research-implementation spaces, increasing the use of evidence in practical conservation and policy-making, and enabling practice and policy to influence research. Ultimately, we hope this will lead to more targeted conservation research and more effective conservation action.
In this paper, we focus on the Conservation Evidence database, describing the methods used to create it and how it helps to overcome barriers between conservation researchers, practitioners and policy-makers. Although aspects of the methods have been described previously (e.g. Dicks et al., 2016; Sutherland and Wordley, 2018), this paper provides the only complete and detailed overview of the methods currently used by Conservation Evidence. Through increasing methodological transparency and communicating what the database is (and is not) designed to do, we hope this paper will encourage effective and appropriate use of this tool. We also discuss the database in a broader context, acknowledging that published evidence is just one of a multitude of factors within research-implementation spaces that affect conservation decision making.
Section snippets
An overview of the conservation evidence database
The Conservation Evidence database gathers, organizes, and summarizes studies that quantify the effects of conservation interventions (i.e. actions that have been or could be used to conserve biodiversity) on any aspect of biodiversity (e.g. abundance of a focal species, survival rates of translocated individuals, use of nest boxes, extent of habitat) or human behavior related to biodiversity conservation (e.g. levels of hunting, or sales of products detrimental to biodiversity). Ultimately,
Synthesizing complex evidence at scale
The methods developed to build the Conservation Evidence database allow for the synthesis of complex evidence across broad subjects and ultimately across whole disciplines. Using discipline-wide searches and subject-wide syntheses, we can efficiently synthesize evidence for both major and obscure topics, with a large or limited evidence base, respectively. Through a combination of summary paragraphs, key messages and expert assessment, we can present a general overview of the evidence
Acknowledgements
The Conservation Evidence project is or has been supported by A.G. Leventis Foundation, Arcadia, British Ecological Society, Defra, Economic and Social Research Council, Joint Nature Conservation Committee, MAVA Foundation, Natural England, Natural Environment Research Council, The Nature Conservancy, South West Water, Synchronicity Earth and Waitrose. Dozens of volunteers and staff have contributed to building the Conservation Evidence database.
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