Scientific knowledge is considered to be an important factor (alongside others) in environmental policy-making. However, the opportunity for environmentalists to influence policy can often occur within short, discrete time windows. Therefore, a piece of research may have a negligible or transformative policy influence depending on when it is presented. These ‘policy windows’ are sometimes predictable, such as those dealing with conventions or legislation with a defined renewal period, but are often hard to anticipate. We describe four ways that environmentalists can respond to policy windows and increase the likelihood of knowledge uptake: 1) foresee (and create) emergent windows, 2) respond quickly to opening windows, 3) frame research in line with appropriate windows, and 4) persevere in closed windows. These categories are closely linked; efforts to enhance the incorporation of scientific knowledge into policy need to harness mechanisms within each. We illustrate the main points with reference to nature conservation, but the principles apply widely
We present the results of a process to attempt to identify 100 questions that, if answered, would make a substantial difference to terrestrial and marine landscape restoration in Europe. Representatives from a wide range of European governmental and nongovernmental conservation organizations, universities, independent ecologists and land managers compiled 677 questions relating to all aspects of European landscape restoration for nature and people. The questions were shortlisted by an email vote, followed by a twoday workshop, to produce the final list of 100 questions. Many of the final questions evolved through a process of modification and combination as the workshop progressed. The questions are divided into eight sections: conservation of biodiversity; connectivity, migration and translocations; delivering and evaluating restoration; natural processes; ecosystem services; social and cultural aspects of restoration; policy and governance; and economics. We anticipate that these questions will help identify new directions for researchers and policy-makers and assist funders and programme managers in allocating funds and planning projects, resulting in improved understanding and implementation of landscape-scale ecological restoration in Europe.
Article impact statement: Questions regarding freshwater ecosystem conservation, role of social structure in human-environment interactions, and impacts of conservation need more attention. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.[3] AbstractIn 2008, a group of conservation scientists compiled a list of 100 priority questions for the conservation of the world's biodiversity [Sutherland et al. (2009) Conservation Biology, 23, 557-567]. However, now almost a decade later, no one has yet published a study gauging how much progress has been made in addressing these 100 high-priority questions in the peer-reviewed literature. Here we take a first step toward re-examining the 100 questions and identify key knowledge gaps that still remain. Through a combination of a questionnaire and a literature review, we evaluated each of the 100 questions on the basis of two criteria: relevance and effort. We defined highly-relevant questions as those which -if answered -would have the greatest impact on global biodiversity conservation, while effort was quantified based on the number of review publications addressing a particular question, which we used as a proxy for research effort. Using this approach we identified a set of questions that, despite being perceived as highly relevant, have been the focus of relatively few review publications over the past ten years. These questions covered a broad range of topics but predominantly tackled three major themes: the conservation and management of freshwater ecosystems, the role of societal structures in shaping interactions between people and the environment, and the impacts of conservation interventions. We see these questions as important knowledge gaps that have so far received insufficient attention and may need to be prioritised in future research. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.[4]
Cultural ecosystem services are undeniably important, yet are typically neglected in land management decisions due to a suite of intractable challenges: they are highly complex, localised, and inextricably associated with landscape features. However, to incorporate the ecosystem services framework into land management, decision‐makers need the tools to disentangle the effects of land use from other factors. This is a major challenge for ecosystem services research. Forestry is a widespread land use that has considerable potential to deliver a broad range of ecosystem services, although this requires careful management planning. Additionally, modern production forestry is undergoing a period of rapid change in the face of a plethora of challenges, such as climate change and disease. To increase cultural ecosystem services delivery from forests, managers need tools to understand the implications of different management options. In this paper, we directly test how land use affects cultural ecosystem services. We use a new approach that recognises the underlying complexity of cultural ecosystem services but produces easily interpretable results that are locally relevant and directly applicable to land management. By combining participatory geographic information systems (GIS) and a novel site matching technique, we relate cultural values explicitly to land management, while accounting for the influence of landscape features. Applying this new method to a major UK forest site, we conducted a large survey to gather participatory GIS data points. We showed that land management significantly affected cultural ecosystem service values and were able to make a series of practical forest management recommendations. Notably, a greater diversity of tree species would improve cultural value, and open space is important within the forest landscape. This approach is highly flexible and can be applied to any type of landscape. It allows cultural ecosystem services to be fully integrated into land management decisions to formulate the best management strategy to maximise ecosystem service delivery. A plain language summary is available for this article.
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