The awareness of the need for robust impact evaluations in conservation is growing and statistical matching techniques are increasingly being used to assess the impacts of conservation interventions. ...Used appropriately matching approaches are powerful tools, but they also pose potential pitfalls. We outlined important considerations and best practice when using matching in conservation science. We identified 3 steps in a matching analysis. First, develop a clear theory of change to inform selection of treatment and controls and that accounts for real‐world complexities and potential spillover effects. Second, select the appropriate covariates and matching approach. Third, assess the quality of the matching by carrying out a series of checks. The second and third steps can be repeated and should be finalized before outcomes are explored. Future conservation impact evaluations could be improved by increased planning of evaluations alongside the intervention, better integration of qualitative methods, considering spillover effects at larger spatial scales, and more publication of preanalysis plans. Implementing these improvements will require more serious engagement of conservation scientists, practitioners, and funders to mainstream robust impact evaluations into conservation. We hope this article will improve the quality of evaluations and help direct future research to continue to improve the approaches on offer.
Emparejamiento Estadístico para la Ciencia de la Conservación
Resumen
Hay más conciencia sobre la necesidad de evaluaciones de impacto más rigurosas y las técnicas de emparejamiento estadístico se están usan con más frecuencia para evaluar los impactos de intervenciones de conservación. Las técnicas de emparejamiento pueden ser herramientas poderosas si son utilizadas correctamente, pero también pueden llevar a conclusiones erróneas. En este artículo describimos consideraciones importantes para realizar estudios de conservación que utilizan técnicas de emparejamiento estadístico. Identificamos tres pasos dentro de un análisis de emparejamiento. Primero, es importante desarrollar una teoría del cambio que considere las complejidades del mundo real y las posibles consecuencias indirectas para poder seleccionar unidades de tratamiento y controles. Segundo, es clave seleccionar las covarianzas y la estrategia de emparejamiento apropiadas. Tercero, evaluar la calidad del emparejamiento a través de una serie de revisiones. El segundo y el tercer paso pueden ser repetidos y deben concluirse antes de que se exploren los resultados. Evaluaciones de impacto de intervenciones de conservación podrían mejorarse con una mejor planeación de las evaluaciones junto con la intervención, una mejor integración de los métodos cualitativos, mejor consideración de consecuencias indirectas a grandes escalas espaciales y un incremento en la publicación de planes pre‐analíticos. La implementación de estas mejoras requerirá de un compromiso más serio por parte de científicos de la conservación, y de practicantes y financiadores. Esperamos que este artículo mejore la calidad de evaluaciones y ayude a guiar futuras investigaciones e intervenciones de conservación.
摘要
目前, 已经有越来越多的人认识到需要对保护的效果进行稳健的评估, 在评估保护措施的影响时也越来越多地应用了统计匹配方法。匹配方法若使用得当可成为有力工具, 但也可能带来潜在陷阱。本研究概述了在保护科学中使用匹配方法时的重要注意事项和最佳实践。我们确定了匹配分析的三个步骤。首先是提出清晰的变化理论来指导实验组和控制组的选择, 其中要考虑到现实世界的复杂性和潜在的溢出效应。接下来, 应选择合适的协变量和匹配方法。最后, 需通过一系列的检查来评估匹配的质量。第二步和第三步可以重复进行, 但要在输出匹配结果前完全确定。在实施保护措施的同时加强评估规划、更好地整合总结定性方法、考虑更大空间尺度的溢出效应, 以及更多地公开发表预分析计划, 将有助于改善未来的保护效果评估体系。实施以上改进措施还需要保护科学家、实践者和资助者的认真参与, 推动保护效果的稳健评估纳入保护工作的主流。我们希望本文有助于提升保护效果评估的质量, 并帮助指导今后的研究以进一步改进现有的方法。【翻译: 胡怡思; 审校: 聂永刚】
Article Impact statement: The article identifies 3 steps in using matching in conservation impact evaluation, highlighting best practice and areas for improvement.
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) play a crucial role in pregnancy, revealed by the presence of placental‐derived EVs in maternal blood, their in vitro functionality, and their altered cargo in pregnancy ...pathologies. These EVs are thought to be involved in the development of pregnancy pathologies, such as pre‐eclampsia, pre‐term birth, and fetal growth restriction, and have been suggested as a source of biomarkers for gestational diseases. However, to accurately interpret their function and biomarker potential, it is necessary to critically evaluate the EV isolation and characterization methodologies used in pregnant cohorts. In this systematic scoping review, we collated the results from 152 studies that have investigated EVs in the blood of pregnant women, and provide a detailed analysis of the EV isolation and characterization methodologies used. Our findings indicate an overall increase in EV concentrations in pregnant compared to non‐pregnant individuals, an increased EV count as gestation progresses, and an increased EV count in some pregnancy pathologies. We highlight the need for improved standardization of methodology, greater focus on gestational changes in EV concentrations, and further investigations into the functionality of EVs. Our review suggests that EVs hold great promise as diagnostic and translational tools for gestational diseases. However, to fully realize their potential, it is crucial to improve the standardization and reliability of EV isolation and characterization methodologies, and to gain a better understanding of their functional roles in pregnancy pathologies.
Upon the FDA approval for inhaled nitric oxide (iNO) in 1999 to treat persistent pulmonary hypertension in neonates, iNO has proven to be a beneficial therapeutic in multiple diseases. We aim to ...review applications of iNO that have modeled its protective and therapeutic attributes, as well as highlight preliminary studies that could allude to future avenues of use. Numerous publications have reported specific incidences where iNO therapy has proved advantageous, while some applications have potential after further validation. Establishing guidelines on dosing, duration, and defined clinical uses are crucial for the future of iNO. Delivery of iNO has been controlled by a sole distributor, and comes with high cost, and lack of portability. A shift in patents has allowed for new designs for iNO device synthesis, with many new developments of iNO medical devices that will likely change the future of iNO in a medical setting.
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•We conducted a systematic review looking at the effectiveness of protected areas.•The search was divided into two outcomes (1) population trends and (2) habitat change.•Studies on populations were ...small case studies focusing in intrinsic drivers.•Studies on habitat change focused on large scale patterns.•Few studies successfully tested protection against comparable counterfactual scenarios.
Protected Areas (PAs) are a critical tool for maintaining habitat integrity and species diversity, and now cover more than 12.7% of the planet’s land surface area. However, there is considerable debate on the extent to which PAs deliver conservation outcomes in terms of habitat and species protection. A systematic review approach is applied to investigate the evidence from peer reviewed and grey literature on the effectiveness of PAs focusing on two outcomes: (a) habitat cover and (b) species populations. We only include studies that causally link conservation inputs to outcomes against appropriate counterfactuals. From 2599 publications we found 76 studies from 51 papers that evaluated impacts on habitat cover, and 42 studies from 35 papers on species populations. Three conclusions emerged: first, there is good evidence that PAs have conserved forest habitat; second, evidence remains inconclusive that PAs have been effective at maintaining species populations, although more positive than negative results are reported in the literature; third, causal connections between management inputs and conservation outcomes in PAs are rarely evaluated in the literature. Overall, available evidence suggests that PAs deliver positive outcomes, but there remains a limited evidence base, and weak understanding of the conditions under which PAs succeed or fail to deliver conservation outcomes.
A mess of plastic
It is not clear what strategies will be most effective in mitigating harm from the global problem of plastic pollution. Borrelle
et al.
and Lau
et al.
discuss possible solutions and ...their impacts. Both groups found that substantial reductions in plastic-waste generation can be made in the coming decades with immediate, concerted, and vigorous action, but even in the best case scenario, huge quantities of plastic will still accumulate in the environment.
Science
, this issue p.
1515
, p.
1455
Even the most optimistic scenario projects huge amounts of plastic pollution in the coming decades.
Plastic pollution is a planetary threat, affecting nearly every marine and freshwater ecosystem globally. In response, multilevel mitigation strategies are being adopted but with a lack of quantitative assessment of how such strategies reduce plastic emissions. We assessed the impact of three broad management strategies, plastic waste reduction, waste management, and environmental recovery, at different levels of effort to estimate plastic emissions to 2030 for 173 countries. We estimate that 19 to 23 million metric tons, or 11%, of plastic waste generated globally in 2016 entered aquatic ecosystems. Considering the ambitious commitments currently set by governments, annual emissions may reach up to 53 million metric tons per year by 2030. To reduce emissions to a level well below this prediction, extraordinary efforts to transform the global plastics economy are needed.
Ensuring that protected areas (PAs) maintain the biodiversity within their boundaries is fundamental in achieving global conservation goals. Despite this objective, wildlife abundance changes in PAs ...are patchily documented and poorly understood. Here, we use linear mixed effect models to explore correlates of population change in 1,902 populations of birds and mammals from 447 PAs globally. On an average, we find PAs are maintaining populations of monitored birds and mammals within their boundaries. Wildlife population trends are more positive in PAs located in countries with higher development scores, and for larger-bodied species. These results suggest that active management can consistently overcome disadvantages of lower reproductive rates and more severe threats experienced by larger species of birds and mammals. The link between wildlife trends and national development shows that the social and economic conditions supporting PAs are critical for the successful maintenance of their wildlife populations.
Conservation relies heavily on protected areas (PAs) maintaining their key biodiversity features to meet global biodiversity conservation goals. However, PAs have had variable success, with many ...failing to fully maintain their biodiversity features. The current literature concerning what drives variability in PA performance is rapidly expanding but unclear, sometimes contradictory, and spread across multiple disciplines. A clear understanding of the drivers of successful biodiversity conservation in PAs is necessary to make them fully effective. Here, we conduct a comprehensive assessment of the current state of knowledge concerning the drivers of biological outcomes within PAs, focusing on those that can be addressed at local scales. We evaluate evidence in support of potential drivers to identify those that enable more successful outcomes and those that impede success and provide a synthetic review. Interactions are discussed where they are known, and we highlight gaps in understanding. We find that elements of PA design, management, and local and national governance challenges, species and system ecology, and sociopolitical context can all influence outcomes. Adjusting PA management to focus on actions and policies that influence the key drivers identified here could improve global biodiversity outcomes.
The mismeasure of conservation Pressey, Robert L.; Visconti, Piero; McKinnon, Madeleine C. ...
Trends in ecology & evolution,
September 2021, 2021-09-00, 20210901, Volume:
36, Issue:
9
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
One of the basic purposes of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation interventions is to achieve conservation impact, the sum of avoided biodiversity loss and promoted recovery ...relative to outcomes without protection. In the context of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s negotiations on the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, we find that targets for area-based interventions are framed overwhelmingly with measures that fail to inform decision-makers about impact and that risk diverting limited resources away from achieving it. We show that predicting impact in space and time is feasible and can provide the basis for global guidance for jurisdictions to develop targets for conservation impact and shift investment priorities to areas where impact can be most effectively achieved.
A key role of area-based conservation is saving biodiversity or achieving conservation impact by avoiding loss and/or promoting recovery.Conservation measures commonly used as policy targets, such as extent of protection and representation of ecosystems and species, are unreliable guides to conservation impact.Most evaluations of the impact of area-based measures have been retrospective, but with lessons for future decisions.Recent developments in impact evaluation show the feasibility of predicting conservation impact as a basis for setting targets and priorities, applicable to a wide range of area-based measures.The post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework has the potential to guide jurisdictions in achieving quantitative targets for impact instead of targets based on measures that could cause area-based conservation interventions to fail in protecting imperiled biodiversity.
Protecting important sites is a key strategy for halting the loss of biodiversity. However, our understanding of the relationship between management inputs and biodiversity outcomes in protected ...areas (PAs) remains weak. Here, we examine biodiversity outcomes using species population trends in PAs derived from the Living Planet Database in relation to management data derived from the Management Effectiveness Tracking Tool (METT) database for 217 population time‐series from 73 PAs. We found a positive relationship between our METT‐based scores for Capacity and Resources and changes in vertebrate abundance, consistent with the hypothesis that PAs require adequate resourcing to halt biodiversity loss. Additionally, PA age was negatively correlated with trends for the mammal subsets and PA size negatively correlated with population trends in the global subset. Our study highlights the paucity of appropriate data for rigorous testing of the role of management in maintaining species populations across multiple sites, and describes ways to improve our understanding of PA performance.
Marine protected areas (MPAs) are increasingly being used globally to conserve marine resources. However, whether many MPAs are being effectively and equitably managed, and how MPA management ...influences substantive outcomes remain unknown. We developed a global database of management and fish population data (433 and 218 MPAs, respectively) to assess: MPA management processes; the effects of MPAs on fish populations; and relationships between management processes and ecological effects. Here we report that many MPAs failed to meet thresholds for effective and equitable management processes, with widespread shortfalls in staff and financial resources. Although 71% of MPAs positively influenced fish populations, these conservation impacts were highly variable. Staff and budget capacity were the strongest predictors of conservation impact: MPAs with adequate staff capacity had ecological effects 2.9 times greater than MPAs with inadequate capacity. Thus, continued global expansion of MPAs without adequate investment in human and financial capacity is likely to lead to sub-optimal conservation outcomes.
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