showing 2 related works from this author
Quantifying and addressing the prevalence and bias of study designs in the environmental and social sciences
2020
Building trust in science and evidence-based decision-making depends heavily on the credibility of studies and their findings. Researchers employ many different study designs that vary in their risk of bias to evaluate the true effect of interventions or impacts. Here, we empirically quantify, on a large scale, the prevalence of different study designs and the magnitude of bias in their estimates. Randomised designs and controlled observational designs with pre-intervention sampling were used by just 23% of intervention studies in biodiversity conservation, and 36% of intervention studies in social science. We demonstrate, through pairwise within-study comparisons across 49 environmental da…
Measuring progress towards rewilding
2018
Human domination of land has transformed ecosystems, modified ecological processes and influenced biodiversity composition across most of the terrestrial biosphere. Nevertheless, this global change does not necessarily translate into a total depletion of natural values. Innovative conservation actions are emerging as a promising strategy to enhance biodiversity, ecological resilience and ecosystem service delivery, as well as to retain ecological and evolutionary potential. For instance, rewilding projects have gained increasing attention from scientists, conservationists, practitioners, decision-makers and the media. Recovering the natural dynamics of ecosystems requires increasing ecosyst…