Beyond describing threats: Rigorous analysis of conservation interventions

Conservation science as a discipline spends a lot of effort describing threats. While this is important, relatively little attention is paid to rigorously testing conservation interventions. Conservation Evidence is one project working to collate the evidence for how well conservation interventions actually work. This is an ongoing project which attempts to keep evidence synthesis ‘live’ and updated, and to facilitate use by a diverse community of people. However we run into problems in collating, interpreting, and encouraging people to use the science due to i) a scarcity of studies for many interventions, ii) poor methodological design hampering interpretation, iii) a poor understanding of how generalizable conservation interventions are, partly due to i and ii, and iv) a reluctance or lack of confidence in using evidence from some quarters. I will describe our theory of change for improving evidence availability and increasing use. I will describe some of the work we are doing as a group to map evidence gaps, to assess the benefits and drawbacks of different study designs for testing interventions, to assist conservation practitioners in properly evaluating the impact of their actions, and to encourage evidence use among NGOs, ecological consultants and governments.