Elsevier

Biological Conservation

Volume 223, July 2018, Pages 82-96
Biological Conservation

The contribution of scientific research to conservation planning

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2018.04.037Get rights and content

Abstract

Conservation planning plays an instrumental role in facilitating progress towards biodiversity targets by providing practitioners with the tools required to allocate resources and implement actions. However, the utility of a burgeoning scientific literature to on-the-ground conservation has been questioned. Given such criticisms, and the lack of progress towards the global Aichi Biodiversity Targets, we aim to assess the contribution of scientific research to the field of conservation planning. We applied topic modelling to a body of literature consisting of 4471 articles pertaining to conservation planning published between 2000 and 2016. We quantified changes in topic popularity, and assessed the extent to which different topics were addressed within the same articles. We found that research into the status of species and habitats was most prevalent, the process of action planning received considerably less attention, and implementation attracted the least research of all. The scientific literature was thus dominated by biological rather than socio-political research, and furthermore showed a general lack of inter-disciplinary research, which is problematic given that ultimately it is the socio-political context that will determine the success of conservation efforts. The number of publications on implementation and monitoring declined over time, suggesting a waning interest in publishing evidence of plan effectiveness, and that limited efforts have been made to address the “implementation crisis”. We suggest that filling research gaps, through integration of the social sciences and placing greater value on evidence syntheses, would push scientific research towards greater applicability and help to provide the necessary information to achieve global biodiversity targets.

Introduction

Conservation planning is the process of “deciding where, when and how to allocate limited conservation resources” (Pressey and Bottrill, 2009). Planning provides practitioners with the information and direction required to allocate resources and implement actions, ranging from the recovery of endangered species (Clark et al., 2002) to the establishment of large-scale protected area networks (Margules and Pressey, 2000). As global conservation targets have evolved since the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the need for conservation planning has become increasingly evident, and planning is now considered essential for achieving the current global Aichi Biodiversity Targets (CBD, 2010, CBD, 2015). Each of the twenty Aichi targets was designed to contribute towards halting the global loss of biodiversity by 2020 (CBD, 2010), and conservation planning should play an instrumental role in facilitating progress towards these targets by providing the strategic framework for the implementation of connected, ecologically representative protected area networks (Aichi Target 11; e.g. Pollock et al., 2017; Venter et al., 2018) and the prevention of species extinctions (Aichi Target 12; e.g. Whitfield et al., 2006; Challender et al., 2014).

Research into conservation planning aims to assist progress towards such ambitious conservation targets, yet there are criticisms about the lack of applicability of much scientific work to practical conservation efforts such as habitat restoration or the designation of protected areas (Knight et al., 2008; Barmuta et al., 2011). Furthermore, current evidence indicates that the majority of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets are unlikely to be met (CBD, 2014); species extinctions and declines have not been halted (Tittensor et al., 2014), and while protected area networks are likely to meet the area coverage targets of 17% terrestrial and 10% marine, they do not adequately cover ecoregions or important areas for biodiversity (Butchart et al., 2015). In the context of current conservation shortcomings and deliberations over the utility of research, it is timely to assess the quantity and diversity of scientific research into conservation planning, and hence assess the availability and applicability of information and advice that can build towards achieving global biodiversity targets.

There is a broad range of different conservation planning frameworks outlined in both the scientific and grey literature (Redford et al., 2003; Pressey and Bottrill, 2009). These frameworks encompass many steps, with each step falling loosely into three broad categories: (i) assessing the current status of, and threats to, species or areas of conservation interest; (ii) determining what actions should be taken; and (iii) implementation and monitoring (Knight et al., 2006a). The specifics of each step can vary greatly among approaches, and different planning frameworks may diverge on issues such as the process of identifying explicit conservation objectives, and the incorporation of socio-economic considerations (Pressey and Bottrill, 2009). Furthermore, planning is a non-linear process, and adaptive management and the revision of plans in response to monitoring outcomes is required for success (Grantham et al., 2010).

The complete conservation planning process is complex, and scientific research projects often focus on in-depth examinations of individual steps or processes within the overall framework. Studies may, for example, assess data requirements (Boitani et al., 2011), incorporate costs estimates (Carwardine et al., 2010), or evaluate the suitability of taxonomic surrogates (Rodrigues and Brooks, 2007). This fragmentation of the overall process leads to a large and complex body of literature, and it has been argued that the consideration of individual aspects of the planning process in isolation can result in a disconnect between scientific advance and practical application (Knight et al., 2008). Recent research has suggested that landscape genetics has so far failed to make much impact on conservation planning (Keller et al., 2015) and species distribution models are used less often in planning than might be expected given the proliferation and sophistication of available methods (Tulloch et al., 2016). Furthermore, planning exercises are frequently carried out without the engagement of the end-user or relevant stakeholders, with one review finding that the majority of the publications considered had the aim of improving research techniques rather than achieving implementation (Knight et al., 2008). These issues bring into question the applicability of much of the research pertaining to conservation planning, and emphasise that research direction has different drivers to conservation needs. For example, funding availability has been shown to stimulate research priorities, and this is subject to politics and the changing popularity of research topics (Stroud et al., 2014).

Obtaining an overview of the availability of information in such a vast and complex body of literature is challenging, particularly when the aim is to capture the full extent of the publishing landscape. Topic modelling provides a statistical tool to assess the content of articles in a corpus (a large body of literature; Blei and Lafferty, 2009). The approach makes use of the co-occurrence patterns of words in article abstracts to identify a range of topics which represent the main ideas present in a corpus (Griffiths and Steyvers, 2004). Topic modelling provides quantitative rigour to summarising themes and allows synthesis across disparate information sources covering different biological, spatial and temporal scales (Westgate et al., 2015). The approach has recently been applied within ecological science to analyse publishing trends in arid ecology research (Greenville et al., 2017), and to compare the topics of conservation-prioritisation articles that did and did not apply species distribution models (Tulloch et al., 2016).

Here, we use topic modelling to assess the contribution of scientific research to the field of conservation planning. We quantify which aspects of the conservation planning process receive the most attention in the published literature, and how topic popularity has changed over time. We also assess the extent to which different aspects of conservation planning are either linked to the broader process or studied in isolation, in order to challenge the implicit assumption that research related to conservation planning is suitable for practical application. We aim to capture the full extent of the publishing landscape; the corpus we analyse consists of 4471 articles published from 2000 to 2016 pertaining to conservation planning. Consideration of this large body of literature allows us to determine potential gaps and neglected fields which could be addressed in order to aid progress towards global biodiversity targets.

Section snippets

Literature search

We searched Web of Science for articles published from 2000 to 2016 using the terms “conservation plan*” or “recovery plan*” and also “biodiversity”, “species”, “habitat*” or “ecosystem*”. We included only articles published in English and which were categorised as articles or reviews according to document type, giving 4619 documents.

Citations and abstracts were downloaded and imported in to the program R (R Core Team, 2017) using the package bibliometrix (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2016). Articles

Results

We used the 20 highest weighted words per topic and topic similarity (see Table A2 and Fig. A3) to name topics and assign them to broad themes (Table 1). The majority of documents in the corpus fell primarily within the theme of Status Review; this included the most frequent topic, which was Genetics (Fig. 1a). Within the same theme, Distribution modelling and Climate change were the next most frequent topics. The theme of Action Planning included six topics and overall fewer documents, with

Discussion

Although extensive and diverse, we found the scientific literature on conservation planning was dominated by biological rather than socio-political research. Research into the status of species and habitats (primarily biological areas) was the most prevalent, with the process of action planning receiving considerably less attention, while implementation (which requires greater consideration of socio-political considerations) was by far the part of the planning process that attracted the least

Conclusions

The scientific literature on conservation planning is extensive, but the focus of research is not necessarily responding to the needs of those implementing conservation plans. Despite the long-standing acknowledgement that conservation is a multi-disciplinary field (Soulé, 1985) and persisting calls for transdisciplinary work (Reyers et al., 2010), we found that research continues to be conducted primarily within unidisciplinary, biological realms. Thus it seems that little has changed in the

Acknowledgements

LM was funded by Newcastle University and the Conservation Planning Specialist Group.

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