The major barriers to evidence-informed conservation policy and possible solutions.

Conservation policy decisions can suffer from a lack of evidence, hindering effective decision-making. In nature conservation, studies investigating why policy is often not evidence-informed have tended to focus on Western democracies, with relatively small samples. To understand global variation and challenges better, we established a global survey aimed at identifying top barriers and solutions to the use of conservation science in policy.

Historical data as a baseline for conservation: reconstructing long-term faunal extinction dynamics in Late Imperial-modern China.

Extinction events typically represent extended processes of decline that cannot be reconstructed using short-term studies. Long-term archives are necessary to determine past baselines and the extent of human-caused biodiversity change, but the capacity of historical datasets to provide predictive power for conservation must be assessed within a robust analytical framework. Local Chinese gazetteers represent a more than 400-year country-level dataset containing abundant information on past environmental conditions and include extensive records of gibbons, which have a restricted present-day distribution but formerly occurred across much of China.

Effect of risk aversion on prioritizing conservation projects.

Conservation outcomes are uncertain. Agencies making decisions about what threat mitigation actions to take to save which species frequently face the dilemma of whether to invest in actions with high probability of success and guaranteed benefits or to choose projects with a greater risk of failure that might provide higher benefits if they succeed. The answer to this dilemma lies in the decision maker's aversion to risk--their unwillingness to accept uncertain outcomes.

Threat to the point: improving the value of comparative extinction risk analysis for conservation action.

Comparative extinction risk analysis is a common approach for assessing the relative plight of biodiversity and making conservation recommendations. However, the usefulness of such analyses for conservation practice has been questioned. One reason for underperformance may be that threats arising from global environmental changes (e.

The population growth consequences of variation in individual heterozygosity.

Heterozygosity has been associated with components of fitness in numerous studies across a wide range of taxa. Because heterozygosity is associated with individual performance it is also expected to be associated with population dynamics. However, investigations into the association between heterozygosity and population dynamics have been rare because of difficulties in linking evolutionary and ecological processes.