Lynn V. Dicks

A horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2014

Highlights • This is the fifth in our annual series of horizon scans published in TREE.• We identify 15 issues that we considered insufficiently known by the conservation community.• These cover a wide range of issues. Four relate to climate change, two to invasives and two to disease spread.• This exercise has been influential in the past.

EU agricultural reform fails on biodiversity

Extra steps by Member States are needed to protect farmed and grassland ecosystems In December 2013, the European Union (EU) enacted the reformed Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for 2014–2020, allocating almost 40% of the EUs budget and influencing management of half of its terrestrial area. Many EU politicians are announcing the new CAP as “greener,” but the new environmental prescriptions are so diluted that they are unlikely to benefit biodiversity. Individual Member States (MSs), however, can still use flexibility granted by the new CAP to design national plans to protect farmland habitats and species and to ensure long-term provision of ecosystem services.

The role of agri-environment schemes in conservation and environmental management

Over half of the European landscape is under agricultural management and has been for millennia. Many species and ecosystems of conservation concern in Europe depend on agricultural management and are showing ongoing declines. Agri-environment schemes (AES) are designed partly to address this. They are a major source of nature conservation funding within the European Union (EU) and the highest conservation expenditure in Europe. We reviewed the structure of current AES across Europe. Since a 2003 review questioned the overall effectiveness of AES for biodiversity, there has been a plethora of case studies and meta-analyses examining their effectiveness. Most syntheses demonstrate general increases in farmland biodiversity in response to AES, with the size of the effect depending on the structure and management of the surrounding landscape. This is important in the light of successive EU enlargement and ongoing reforms of AES. We examined the change in effect size over time by merging the data sets of 3 recent meta-analyses and found that schemes implemented after revision of the EUs agri-environmental programs in 2007 were not more effective than schemes implemented before revision. Furthermore, schemes aimed at areas out of production (such as field margins and hedgerows) are more effective at enhancing species richness than those aimed at productive areas (such as arable crops or grasslands). Outstanding research questions include whether AES enhance ecosystem services, whether they are more effective in agriculturally marginal areas than in intensively farmed areas, whether they are more or less cost-effective for farmland biodiversity than protected areas, and how much their effectiveness is influenced by farmer training and advice? The general lesson from the European experience is that AES can be effective for conserving wildlife on farmland, but they are expensive and need to be carefully designed and targeted. El Papel de los Esquemas Agro-Ambientales en la Conservación y el Manejo Ambiental Batáry et al. Resumen Más de la mitad de las tierras europeas está bajo manejo agrícola y así ha sido durante milenios. Muchas especies y ecosistemas de interés de conservación en Europa dependen del manejo agrícola y están mostrando una declinación continua. Los esquemas agro-ambientales (EAA) están diseñados en parte para encarar esto. Los esquemas son una gran fuente de financiamiento para la conservación dentro de la Unión Europea (UE) y el mayor gasto de conservación en Europa. Revisamos la estructura de los EAA actuales a lo largo del continente. Desde que en 2003 una revisión cuestionó la efectividad general de los EAA para la biodiversidad, ha habido una plétora de estudios de caso y meta-análisis que examinan su efectividad. La mayoría de las síntesis demuestran un incremento general en la biodiversidad de las tierras de cultivo en respuesta a los EAA, con la magnitud del efecto dependiente de la estructura y el manejo del terreno circundante. Esto es importante a la luz del crecimiento sucesivo de la UE y las continuas reformas a los EAA. Examinamos el cambio en la magnitud del efecto a través del tiempo al fusionar los conjuntos de datos de tres meta-análisis recientes y encontramos que los esquemas implementados después de la revisión de los programas agro-ambientales de la UE en 2007 no fueron más efectivos que los esquemas implementados antes de la revisión. Además, los esquemas enfocados en las áreas fuera de producción (como los márgenes de campo y los setos vivos) son más efectivos en el mejoramiento de la riqueza de especies que aquellos enfocados en las áreas productivas (como los cultivos arables y los pastizales). Las preguntas sobresalientes de la investigación incluyen si los EAA mejoran los servicios ambientales, si son más efectivos en las áreas agrícolas marginales que en las áreas de cultivo intensivo, si son más o menos rentables para la biodiversidad de las tierras de cultivo que las áreas protegidas, y en cuánto influye sobre su efectividad los consejos y el entrenamiento dado a los granjeros. La lección general de la experiencia europea es que los EAA pueden ser efectivos para la conservación de la vida silvestre en las tierras de cultivo, pero son caros y necesitan ser diseñados y enfocados cuidadosamente.

Safeguarding pollinators and their values to human well-being

Wild and managed pollinators provide a wide range of benefits to society in terms of contributions to food security, farmer and beekeeper livelihoods, social and cultural values, as well as the maintenance of wider biodiversity and ecosystem stability. Pollinators face numerous threats, including changes in land-use and management intensity, climate change, pesticides and genetically modified crops, pollinator management and pathogens, and invasive alien species. There are well-documented declines in some wild and managed pollinators in several regions of the world. However, many effective policy and management responses can be implemented to safeguard pollinators and sustain pollination services.

How can higher-yield farming help to spare nature?

Mechanisms to link yield increases with conservation Expansion of land area used for agriculture is a leading cause of biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions, particularly in the tropics. One potential way to reduce these impacts is to increase food production per unit area (yield) on existing farmland, so as to minimize farmland area and to spare land for habitat conservation or restoration. There is now widespread evidence that such a strategy could benefit a large proportion of wild species, provided that spared land is conserved as natural habitat (1). However, the scope for yield growth to spare land by lowering food prices and, hence, incentives for clearance (“passive” land sparing) can be undermined if lower prices stimulate demand and if higher yields raise profits, encouraging agricultural expansion and increasing the opportunity cost of conservation (2, 3). We offer a first description of four categories of “active” land-sparing mechanisms that could overcome these rebound effects by linking yield increases with habitat protection or restoration (table S1). The effectiveness, limitations, and potential for unintended consequences of these mechanisms have yet to be systematically tested, but in each case, we describe real-world interventions that illustrate how intentional links between yield increases and land sparing might be developed.

How can local and traditional knowledge be effectively incorporated into international assessments

There have been persistent calls for greater use oflocal and traditional or indigenous knowledge alongsideconventional scientific knowledge in making decisionsabout biodiversity and natural resources (Fazey et al., 2006;Raymond et al., 2010). Yet such calls are rarely reflectedin practice. Different types of knowledge have not been wellintegrated into national and international assessment ex-ercises, including the Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and The Eco-nomics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Turnhout, 2012),allofwhichfocusalmostexclusivelyonconventionalscientificknowledge. The newly formed Intergovernmental Platformon Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), chargedwith strengthening the knowledge base for decision-makersconcernedwithbiodiversityconservationandtheimportanceof the environment for human well-being, aspires to dobetter. Its operating principle is to ‘Recognize and respectthe contribution of indigenous and local knowledge to theconservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and ecosys-tems’.Thereisanurgentneedtoestablishprocessestoachievethis if such aspirations areto be translated into good practice(Tengo et al., 2013; Sutherland, 2013; Thaman et al., 2013).Hereweoutlinewhywebelieveanexplicitsetofprocessesisneeded,includingwithinIPBES,torecognizeandintegrateinformation from conventional science and local andtraditional knowledge systems. We identify key features ofsuch processes and propose a specific mechanism that couldhelpintegrateinformationfromdifferent,parallelknowledgesystems into international knowledge assessments.There are clear benefits of incorporating local andtraditional knowledge alongside conventional scientificknowledge when assessing current understanding to guidedecision-making (Tengo et al., 2013). Local and traditionalknowledge can provide complementary perspectives, bornefromlongperiodsofsharedobservationandexperimentationthat are often lacking in conventional scientific knowledge.The latter commonly depends on sets of observations orexperiments conducted over relatively short time-scales bygroups of people disconnected from the environmentalcontext. Local knowledge, for example, has been repeatedlyshown to extend our understanding of the spatial andtemporal dynamics of biodiversity, including for individualspecies (e.g. the Arctic fox Alopex lagopus; Gagnon B van Oudenhoven & Haider, 2012).Limiting the collation of information to conventionalscience could also mean that science conducted in moredeveloped countries (with larger scientific budgets) maydictate decision-making elsewhere. This situation is unlikelytobeeitherpoliticallyacceptableorappropriate.Thereisoftena mismatch between the needs of decision-makers and theconventional scientific knowledge available (Amano &Sutherland, 2013). This mismatch is important, as illustratedby considering pollinators, a topic of considerable currentinterest and favoured for the first IPBES assessment. In aglobalreviewofconventionalscientificevidencefortheeffectsof interventions to maintain or restore wild bee populations(Dicksetal.,2010)30ofthe163studiesidentifiedwereoutsideEurope and North America. With evidence for effectivenessbasedlargelyintemperateregions,interventionsonlyrelevantto the tropics are poorly understood and may even beoverlooked.Insuchcontexts,localandtraditionalknowledgeare particularly necessary to enable assessments that aretailored to local understanding and needs.So how can information from traditional and conven-tional scientific knowledge be effectively combined in thecontext of national and international assessments? Wesuggest there are at least three parts to the addressing ofthis problem. The first step is to recognize that there arefundamentally different types of knowledge, each associatedwith different needs for different stakeholder groups (Fazeyet al., 2006). Here, it is important to distinguish information(whether drawn from observations or experiment, or from ascientific study or experience, information can be tested insome way) from values (i.e. preferences relating to prioritiesfor action or particular outcomes) and associated mentalmodels (i.e. the cognitive frameworks that people use tointerpret and understand the world). Values and mentalmodels must be made explicit to ensure that collaborationamongst stakeholders involved in an assessment is

The potential for indirect effects between co-flowering plants via shared pollinators depends on resource abundance, accessibility and relatedness

Co-flowering plant species commonly share flower visitors, and thus have the potential to influence each others pollination. In this study we analysed 750 quantitative plant-pollinator networks from 28 studies representing diverse biomes worldwide. We show that the potential for one plant species to influence another indirectly via shared pollinators was greater for plants whose resources were more abundant (higher floral unit number and nectar sugar content) and more accessible. The potential indirect influence was also stronger between phylogenetically closer plant species and was independent of plant geographic origin (native vs. non-native). The positive effect of nectar sugar content and phylogenetic proximity was much more accentuated for bees than for other groups. Consequently, the impact of these factors depends on the pollination mode of plants, e.g. bee or fly pollinated. Our findings may help predict which plant species have the greatest importance in the functioning of plant-pollination networks.

The Effect of Scientific Evidence on Conservation Practitioners' Management Decisions

A major justification of environmental management research is that it helps practitioners, yet previous studies show it is rarely used to inform their decisions. We tested whether conservation practitioners focusing on bird management were willing to use a synopsis of relevant scientific literature to inform their management decisions. This allowed us to examine whether the limited use of scientific information in management is due to a lack of access to the scientific literature or whether it is because practitioners are either not interested or unable to incorporate the research into their decisions. In on-line surveys, we asked 92 conservation managers, predominantly from Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, to provide opinions on 28 management techniques that could be applied to reduce predation on birds. We asked their opinions before and after giving them a summary of the literature about the interventions’ effectiveness. We scored the overall effectiveness and certainty of evidence for each intervention through an expert elicitation process—the Delphi method. We used the effectiveness scores to assess the practitioners’ level of understanding and awareness of the literature. On average, each survey participant changed their likelihood of using 45.7% of the interventions after reading the synopsis of the evidence. They were more likely to implement effective interventions and avoid ineffective actions, suggesting that their intended future management strategies may be more successful than current practice. More experienced practitioners were less likely to change their management practices than those with less experience, even though they were not more aware of the existing scientific information than less experienced practitioners. The practitioners’ willingness to change their management choices when provided with summarized scientific evidence suggests that improved accessibility to scientific information would benefit conservation management outcomes. El Efecto de la Evidencia Científica sobre las Decisiones de Manejo de Quienes Practican la Conservación Resumen Una justificación mayor de la investigación en el manejo ambiental es que ayuda a quienes lo practican, aunque estudios previos muestran que rara vez se usa para informar sus decisiones. Probamos si quienes practican la conservación enfocada en el manejo de aves estaban dispuestos a usar una sinopsis de literatura científica relevante para informar sus decisiones de manejo. Esto permitió que examináramos si el uso limitado de información científica en el manejo se debe a una falta de acceso a la literatura científica o si se debe a que quienes practican la conservación no están interesados o no son capaces de incorporar la investigación a sus decisiones. En encuestas en línea les preguntamos a 92 practicantes de la conservación, la mayoría de Australia, Nueva Zelanda y el Reino Unido, que nos proporcionaran opiniones sobre 28 técnicas de manejo que podrían aplicarse para reducir la depredación de aves. Les pedimos sus opiniones antes y después de darles un resumen de la literatura sobre la efectividad de las intervenciones. Calificamos la efectividad general y la certidumbre de la evidencia para cada intervención por medio de un proceso de extracción por expertos – el método Delphi. Usamos las calificaciones de la efectividad para evaluar el nivel de entendimiento y de percatación de la literatura de quienes practican la conservación. En promedio, cada participante de la encuesta cambió su probabilidad de usar 45.7% de las intervenciones después de leer la sinopsis de la evidencia. Fue más probable que implementaran intervenciones efectivas y evitar acciones poco efectivas, lo que sugiere que sus estrategias de manejo futuras puedan ser más exitosas que las de práctica actual. Los practicantes con mayor experiencia tuvieron una menor probabilidad de cambiar sus prácticas de manejo que aquellos con menos experiencia, aunque no estuvieron más conscientes de la información científica existente que quienes tenían menos experiencia. La disponibilidad de los practicantes para cambiar sus opciones de manejo al proporcionárseles evidencia científica resumida sugiere que el acceso mejorado a la información científica podría beneficiar los resultados del manejo de la conservación.

Quantifying the Impact and Relevance of Scientific Research

Qualitative and quantitative methods are being developed to measure the impacts of research on society, but they suffer from serious drawbacks associated with linking a piece of research to its subsequent impacts. We have developed a method to derive impact scores for individual research publications according to their contribution to answering questions of quantified importance to end users of research. To demonstrate the approach, here we evaluate the impacts of research into means of conserving wild bee populations in the UK. For published papers, there is a weak positive correlation between our impact score and the impact factor of the journal. The process identifies publications that provide high quality evidence relating to issues of strong concern. It can also be used to set future research agendas.

Identifying key knowledge needs for evidence-based conservation of wild insect pollinators: A collaborative cross-sectoral exercise

In response to evidence of insect pollinator declines, organisations in many sectors, including the food and farming industry, are investing in pollinator conservation. They are keen to ensure that their efforts use the best available science. We convened a group of 32 ‘conservation practitioners’ with an active interest in pollinators and 16 insect pollinator scientists. The conservation practitioners include representatives from UK industry (including retail), environmental non‐government organisations and nature conservation agencies. We collaboratively developed a long list of 246 knowledge needs relating to conservation of wild insect pollinators in the UK. We refined and selected the most important knowledge needs, through a three‐stage process of voting and scoring, including discussions of each need at a workshop. We present the top 35 knowledge needs as scored by conservation practitioners or scientists. We find general agreement in priorities identified by these two groups. The priority knowledge needs will structure ongoing work to make science accessible to practitioners, and help to guide future science policy and funding. Understanding the economic benefits of crop pollination, basic pollinator ecology and impacts of pesticides on wild pollinators emerge strongly as priorities, as well as a need to monitor floral resources in the landscape.