Effectiveness of perches in promoting bird-mediated seed dispersal for natural forest regeneration: a systematic review.

Background: Assisted Natural Regeneration (ANR) is an increasingly popular cost-effective approach to restore forests for climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation. One ANR strategy is the use of perches to attract avian seed dispersers to degraded landscapes for increased seed supply and seedling establishment. This systematic review sought to determine the effectiveness of artificial, semi-natural, and natural perches in promoting natural forest regeneration, specifically in driving four outcomes: seed richness, seed density, seedling richness, and seedling density.

Precision ecology for targeted conservation action.

Addressing the coupled threats of catastrophic climate change and biodiversity loss requires implementation of conservation and restoration actions globally. However, on-the-ground action is hindered by context dependency: the ubiquitous challenge that implementation outcomes vary from place to place due to complex dependencies among social and ecological drivers. Policymakers and practitioners recognize the need to tailor solutions to contexts, and target actions to places where they will work effectively.

A social network analysis of the European science-policy-society interface on biodiversity.

Despite the wealth of evidence on biodiversity status, trends, and policy options in Europe, knowledge often fails to inform policy makers and decision makers effectively. Implementing the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 will require the transformation of engagement and exchange between knowledge providers and policy and decision makers. This is one of the main goals of the forthcoming EU Science Service for Biodiversity.

Predicting risk to bat species from wind turbine collision in Southeast Asia.

Wind farms can pose significant risks to bat populations through collisions with turbines, habitat loss, and effects on behavior. With its rich bat diversity and expanding wind power industry, Southeast Asia lacks sufficient data to assess the risks posed to bat species from wind turbine collisions. We aimed to develop a predictive framework for assessing wind turbine risk to bats in Southeast Asia based on global bat fatality data and trait-based assessments.

The promise of community-driven preprints in ecology and evolution.

Publishing preprints is quickly becoming commonplace in ecology and evolutionary biology. Preprints can facilitate the rapid sharing of scientific knowledge establishing precedence and enabling feedback from the research community before peer review. Yet, significant barriers to preprint use exist, including language barriers, a lack of understanding about the benefits of preprints and a lack of diversity in the types of research outputs accepted (e.

How effective are perches in promoting bird-mediated seed dispersal for natural forest regeneration? A systematic review protocol.

Background: Forest landscape restoration (FLR), often through tree planting, is one of the priorities in many global and national initiatives for carbon offsetting as part of climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation. However, active efforts to meet FLR objectives entail substantial costs for the procurement of planting stocks and require an experienced workforce for planting and nurturing tree seedlings. Alternatively, restoration projects can be more cost-effective and potentially may have greater biodiversity gain through assisting and accelerating natural forest regeneration.

Environmental evidence in action: on the science and practice of evidence synthesis and evidence-based decision-making.

In civil society we expect that policy and management decisions will be made using the best available evidence. Yet, it is widely known that there are many barriers that limit the extent to which that occurs. One way to overcome these barriers is via robust, comprehensive, transparent and repeatable evidence syntheses (such as systematic reviews) that attempt to minimize various forms of bias to present a summary of existing knowledge for decision-making purposes.

Method Reporting with Initials for Transparency (MeRIT) promotes more granularity and accountability for author contributions.

Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) has recently changed how author contributions are acknowledged. To extend and complement CRediT, we propose MeRIT, a new way of writing the Methods section using the author’s initials to further clarify contributor roles for reproducibility and replicability.

ROBITT: A tool for assessing the risk-of-bias in studies of temporal trends in ecology.

Aggregated species occurrence and abundance data from disparate sources are increasingly accessible to ecologists for the analysis of temporal trends in biodiversity. However, sampling biases relevant to any given research question are often poorly explored and infrequently reported; this can undermine statistical inference. In other disciplines, it is common for researchers to complete 'risk-of-bias' assessments to expose and document the potential for biases to undermine conclusions.

The evidence synthesis and meta-analysis in R conference (ESMARConf): levelling the playing field of conference accessibility and equitability.

Rigorous evidence is vital in all disciplines to ensure efficient, appropriate, and fit-for-purpose decision-making with minimised risk of unintended harm. To date, however, disciplines have been slow to share evidence synthesis frameworks, best practices, and tools amongst one another. Recent progress in collaborative digital and programmatic frameworks, such as the free and Open Source software R, have significantly expanded the opportunities for development of free-to-use, incrementally improvable, community driven tools to support evidence synthesis (e.

Citationchaser: A tool for transparent and efficient forward and backward citation chasing in systematic searching.

Systematic searching aims to find all possibly relevant research from multiple sources, the basis for an unbiased and comprehensive evidence base. Along with bibliographic databases, systematic reviewers use a variety of additional methods to minimise procedural bias. Citation chasing exploits connections between research articles to identify relevant records for a review by making use of explicit mentions of one article within another.

Using the Value of Information to improve conservation decision making.

Conservation decisions are challenging, not only because they often involve difficult conflicts among outcomes that people value, but because our understanding of the natural world and our effects on it is fraught with uncertainty. Value of Information (VoI) methods provide an approach for understanding and managing uncertainty from the standpoint of the decision maker. These methods are commonly used in other fields (e.

Model selection and averaging in the assessment of the drivers of household food waste to reduce the probability of false positives.

Food waste from households contributes the greatest proportion to total food waste in developed countries. Therefore, food waste reduction requires an understanding of the socio-economic (contextual and behavioural) factors that lead to its generation within the household. Addressing such a complex subject calls for sound methodological approaches that until now have been conditioned by the large number of factors involved in waste generation, by the lack of a recognised definition, and by limited available data.