This is amazing. what is the cost, is it very expensive?. Thanks

Very well described.Nice illustrations too.

Here are the links to the reports mentioned by Mike Morecroft during his presentation: 1. Carbon storage and sequestration report publications.naturalengland.org.uk/publication/5419124441481216 2. Adaptation manual publications.naturalengland.org.uk/publication/5679197848862720

Here is a link to the interactive bird map mentioned in the workshop: translatesciences.com/bird-language-app/

Post-workshop question: "Other than camera traps, what other methods did you or your team has used?" Dr Justine Shanti Alexander: "Our team applies a range of research and conservation tools. The research methods include camera trapping, collaring of snow leopards and prey species, sign surveys, prey surveys (i.e. double observer methods), social surveys, key informant survey, one health methods and more etc."

Post-workshop question: "What data management software is used for the camera trap photos, and is the same software used for camera trap photos in all the different areas?" Dr Justine Shanti Alexander: "Snow Leopard Trust and our partners use a range of data management softwares. This includes Dropbox, digiKam and CamTrapR."

Post-workshop question: "You said that sometimes…snow leopard[s] might eat some of the livestock. Was that a problem [when] involving the community or [was] the situation…not as bad as, say, leopards in South America or tigers?" Dr Justine Shanti Alexander: "Snow Leopards do prey on livestock. This is a concern as communities sharing snow leopard landscapes are primarily agro-pastoral communities and depend on livestock for their income, wellbeing and more. A snow leopard individual may also repeatedly attack a livestock corral enclosure over several months causing large losses of livestock. Retaliatory killing of snow leopards in response to livestock loss is considered a major threat to the species."

Link to the blog post mentioned by Matthias Fiechter during the workshop: snowleopard.org/poachers-identified-thanks-camera-trap/

Спасибо за полезные сообщение

Спасибо за полезные информации

Monitoring research gives the best and most accurate results

Kathy Meakin (Butterfly Conservation): Delivering cheap and effective small scale monitoring of nature reserves in the UK NGO sector is an area I have been working on: doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2017.10.013 We urgently need dialogue with funders and decision makers to enable them to ask the incisive questions about what monitoring is needed to overcome the evidence problem. It is an elephant in the room that goes deep into the issue of public understanding of science, that as Hugh said, COVID-19 might just have helped us with. Once I explained monitoring as a mandatory process of auditing, my member of parliament has decided to take up my case for monitoring with the Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra). Here in the UK, agricultural reforms are going through parliament that will pay farmers for delivering public environmental goods, which explicitly includes biodiversity gain. How are the farmers to show this without a biodiversity auditing system? To my knowledge, the evidence mechanism has not been addressed. I'm interested in building up demand for evidence from the ground up, as my paper shows it can be done in a meaningful way for landowners.

We didn’t get to ask all questions that came in during Hugh Possingham's workshop. If you have any questions for Hugh, or anything else you'd like to share, please comment below 👇

Tasfia Tasnim (International Centre for Climate Change and Development): Do you have any suggestions on what tools to use to gather mainly grey literature? Harriet Downey: There are a number of platforms that provide case studies and grey literature. These include PANORAMA (panorama.solutions/en) and The Open Standards (cmp-openstandards.org/), and Applied Ecology Resources (bit.ly/BES-AER) will be a major platform for this too. For access to theses and dissertations, which are often not written up as academic papers, you can use Open Access Theses and Dissertations (oatd.org/). I would also recommend checking the websites of governmental organisations or NGOs for any relevant reports. We collate tests of actions from unpublished studies and welcome other organisations that will search their online reports (who can then become Evidence Champions: bit.ly/CE-Evidence-Champions).

Jon Fisher: The Conservation Evidence tool is understandably missing a LOT of evidence. Is there a way to avoid conflating evidence on the website with all evidence that exists elsewhere? How can people help to flag when tools like this have representative or non-representative evidence as a starting point? Harriet Downey: Thank you for your question. I wonder if you could clarify what evidence you think Conservation Evidence is missing? Could you possibly give a couple of examples? This comment has been made before, but it is usually based on material that CE would not include. CE does not cover all evidence, only that which is a direct quantitative test of management interventions. CE searches the journals in a systematic and comprehensive manner to be representative of the journals. Some work has shown that there are a range of serious biases in the literature (Christie et al. 2019, 2020). Conservation Evidence is just one tool needed in wider conservation decision-making. It only summarises the scientific evidence for the effectiveness of conservation interventions and so it does not cover threats, population trends or other potentially relevant environmental outcomes (e.g. carbon storage). It also does not include modelling or correlative studies, as they do not test actions on the ground. CE systematically searches the published scientific literature (journals), including those in non-English languages, it also searches other sources such as report series (‘grey literature’). It would be difficult to estimate the answer to grey literature and unpublished studies as we simply don’t know the extent of this, and often the grey literature available for interventions is much less than expected. As an example, for the first edition of the bat synopsis an organisation felt that CE had missed a substantial amount of evidence, including from their reports, however, following a search of 1,022 of their reports (all those on CE relevant subjects), only one tested an action for bats and was included. Other examples include only 5 of 945 of NatureScot reports testing actions and 7 of 687 British Trust for Ornithology reports. Furthermore, CE has yet to cover all taxa/ habitats. So, in terms of what CE covers (published studies of interventions), I would say it is a good representation. Two examples to illustrate this are: • A paper reviewing the literature on reducing bear conflict - their systematic review was done in parallel with CE doing the mammal synopsis so we can compare the outputs. The paper covers 16 actions (we review 66 for mammal conflict overall) and finds 48 papers (we have 64 on these actions). • An EU report on seabird bycatch covered 17 actions (we review 24 relating to bycatch) and found 36 papers (we found 40). CE are always happy to hear from people who think that some evidence is missing if they wish to submit it to the site.

Elisa Fuentes-Montemayor: How can we improve communication between scientists and practitioners to ensure that ecological research addresses key knowledge gaps affecting practitioners & policy-makers? Harriet Downey: I think there are a number of ways this can happen. Firstly, developing a practitioner-led research agenda can play a really important role here, allowing those undertaking practical conservation work to inform the research community of the information they really need (see O’Connell, M., & White, R. (2017). Academics can also be culprits of evidence complacency. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 1(11), 1589-1589). Capacity building on both sides would really help with this too. Not only providing training and tools for practitioners to better use scientific research in their work, but also training for academics to better understand the challenges that practitioners face when implementing their work, and developing communication skills to ensure their work reaches the right places in an appropriate format. We could also be creating more opportunities for these communities to interact, and some are available for example, Applied Ecology Resources, Evidence Champions from Conservation Evidence. I also think establishing good relationships between universities and conservation organisations would help here.

Antonella Panebianco: What are useful tools to cope with conflict of interests among all the members taking part in decision-making? Harriet Downey: There are a wide variety of strategies developed to do this. Primarily it is important to ensure that everyone is involved from the very beginning and not adding people in at a later stage to sign off something that has already been decided. Structured decision-making (e.g. Gregory et al. 2012) can help in group decision-making processes and discusses the serious challenge of trading off environmental, economic and social interests that different stakeholders may have.

Parvathi K. Prasad: I was wondering if you think it's important to include, in addition to success/failure of conservation measures, the 'why/why not' behind the measures, particularly with respect to a broader conservation context? For example, fences may have reduced human-wildlife conflict, but we may have to look at it from a connectivity perspective. Harriet Downey: Yes, I think this is really important. You don’t want to be implementing something that has potentially unwanted trade-offs, like in the example you describe. On Conservation Evidence, you can see that actions are given ‘Harms’ scores which deal with this point. I think it’s also really important to make it really clear in papers, reports, guidance documents etc. what the outcome is, and also to report other potential impacts of that decision. Tools like Multi-criteria Decision Analysis (besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/2041-210X.12899) can help decision-makers explore these different trade-offs and identify optimal decisions for a given context.

Jessica (Collaboration for Environmental Evidence): Hello, I work for the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence and wanted to share our new free evidence service CEEDER that might be useful for attendees of this session. Users can search for environmental reviews of relevance and see an independent assessment of the review’s reliability before using it in their decision making: environmentalevidence.shinyapps.io/CEEDER/

We didn’t get to ask all questions that came in during Harriet Downey’s workshop. However, Harriet has since answered some of them below. We also provide below some of the resources other attendees shared during the workshop 👇