Applied research involves interactions between different organisations—academia, industry, government. Breakdowns in communication can occur during these interactions which alter a project's outcome. We omit how we encounter and overcome these problems from scientific manuscripts which mask the social and cultural considerations that are critical to a project's success. Autoethnography is a form of structured reflection whereby researchers use personal experience to contribute to understanding collaborative processes. We propose an applied form of autoethnography as a repeatable protocol to describe inter‐organisational interactions during the research process in ecology and environmental research. We demonstrate the use of this protocol with five case studies from a diversity of wildlife research across a wide variety of experience levels and scales from small mammals, large herbivores and predators to digital ecology. Our applied autoethnography protocol would ensure that specific biases and context are adequately described and that problems encountered and lessons learned from the experience are reflected upon. These reports can be presented as stand‐alone publications where appropriate, that is, to communicate an effective solution for a novel problem, or within the methods or supplementary material of manuscripts to further explain how the project developed from initial idea to final publication. Furthermore, this protocol can be used by practitioners to evaluate the trajectory of management decisions and policy implications in their jurisdiction to promote transparency and improve communication with stakeholders. Synthesis and Applications: Applied science will continue to intersect with organisations that help or hinder research efforts depending on cultural contexts and biases. Using adequate reflection on case studies to record these experiences and disseminate lessons to the wider community will improve how we approach problems in research, help us to avoid repeating mistakes and ultimately save time and resources. Outside of research, case studies derived from this protocol allow practitioners to holistically understand the methods, biases and challenges of the research from a new perspective, thus providing a novel knowledge brokering function between academia and practitioners in applied ecology.
The greatest crises of our time are environmental. To combat the effects of climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation will require the actions of all members of society. However, despite widespread consensus from the scientific community that human actions are driving this rapid environmental degradation, it remains unclear whether and to what extent the public is receiving and engaging with conservation messages. Natural history films have been suggested as one possible medium for generating awareness of conservation issues en masse but some environmental advocates have criticised these shows for lacking strong, focused conservation messaging. This study quantifies audience engagement with conservation themes and species depicted on screen in two BBC natural history super productions (Blue Planet II and Seven Worlds, One Planet) and a stand‐alone documentary with an explicit focus on conservation (Extinction: The Facts) by using big data analyses of Wikipedia page views during and after broadcast of each show and causal impact analysis. Our results indicate that natural history films are more effective at generating species awareness than transmitting conservation messages, but that audience engagement generated by conservation‐focused documentaries can be comparable to that generated by entire film series focused on natural history. With the ultimate goal of contributing to long‐term behavioural change, our results suggest that natural history films have the potential to drive mass audience engagement with conservation themes through better collaboration between filmmakers, conservationists and conservation messaging researchers. Finally, this study underscores how big data approaches can quantify the effectiveness of conservation messages across different mediums. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
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