Aligning the logics of inquiry and action to address the biodiversity crisis

Despite an abundance of research reaffirming biodiversity's importance to the health of the planet and society, species continue to go extinct at an alarming rate. Why has continued research on the value of biodiversity not had the intended effect and what can be done about it? We considered biodiversity loss as a public value failure and the result of a misalignment between the logic of inquiry (which guides scientists) and the logic of action (which guides practitioners). We drew lessons from our own research to propose the creation of a national biodiversity strategy designed to link the logic of inquiry with the logic of action and coordinate the production of actionable conservation science and informed conservation action.

The challenge of biased evidence in conservation

Efforts to tackle the current biodiversity crisis need to be as efficient and effective as possible given chronic underfunding. To inform decision-makers of the most effective conservation actions, it is important to identify biases and gaps in the conservation literature to prioritize future evidence generation. We used the Conservation Evidence database to assess the state of the global literature that tests conservation actions for amphibians and birds. For the studies in the database, we investigated their spatial and taxonomic extent and distribution across biomes, effectiveness metrics, and study designs. Studies were heavily concentrated in Western Europe and North America for birds and particularly for amphibians, and temperate forest and grassland biomes were highly represented relative to their percentage of land coverage. Studies that used the most reliable study designs-before-after control-impact and randomized controlled trials-were the most geographically restricted and scarce in the evidence base. There were negative spatial relationships between the numbers of studies and the numbers of threatened and data-deficient species worldwide. Taxonomic biases and gaps were apparent for amphibians and birds-some entire orders were absent from the evidence base-whereas others were poorly represented relative to the proportion of threatened species they contained. Metrics used to evaluate effectiveness of conservation actions were often inconsistent between studies, potentially making them less directly comparable and evidence synthesis more difficult. Testing conservation actions on threatened species outside Western Europe, North America, and Australasia should be prioritized. Standardizing metrics and improving the rigor of study designs used to test conservation actions would also improve the quality of the evidence base for synthesis and decision-making.