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Conservation practitioners, policy-makers and researchers work within shared spaces with many shared goals. Improving the flow of information between conservation researchers, practitioners and policy-makers could lead to dramatic gains in the effectiveness of conservation practice. However, several barriers can hinder this transfer including lack of time, inaccessibility of evidence, the real or perceived irrelevance of scientific research to practical questions, and the politically motivated spread of disinformation. Conservation Evidence works to overcome these barriers by providing a freely-available database of summarized scientific evidence for the effects of conservation interventions on biodiversity. The methods used to build this database -a combination of discipline-wide literature searching and subject-wide evidence synthesis -have been developed over the last 15 years to address the challenges of synthesizing large volumes of evidence of varying quality and measured outcome

There is growing interest in evidence‐based conservation, yet there are no widely accepted standard definitions of evidence, let alone guidance on how to use it in the context of conservation and natural resource management practice. In this paper, we first draw on insights of evidence‐based practice from different disciplines to define evidence as being the “relevant information used to assess one or more hypotheses related to a question of interest.” We then construct a typology of different kinds of information, hypotheses, and evidence and show how these different types can be used in different steps of conservation practice. In particular, we distinguish between specific evidence used to assess project hypotheses and generic evidence used to assess generic hypotheses. We next build on this typology to develop a decision tree to support practitioners in how to appropriately use available specific and generic evidence in a given conservation situation. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of how to better promote and enable evidence‐based conservation in both projects and across the discipline of conservation. Our hope is that by understanding and using evidence better, conservation can both become more effective and attract increased support from society.

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