Improving scientific rigour in conservation evaluations and a plea deal for transparency on potential biases
Abstract The delivery of rigorous and unbiased evidence on the effects of interventions lay at the heart of the scientific method. Here we examine scientific papers evaluating agri‐environment schemes, the principal instrument to mitigate farmland biodiversity declines worldwide. Despite previous warnings about rudimentary study designs in this field, we found that the majority of studies published between 2008 and 2017 still lack robust study designs to strictly evaluate intervention effects. Potential sources of bias that arise from the correlative nature are rarely mentioned, and results are still promoted by using a causal language. This lack of robust study designs likely results from …
Habitat suitability models for the Siberian jay (Perisoreus infaustus) from Citizen Science and systematic monitoring data: incorporating information about the reporting process
Opportunistically collected presence-only data contributed by volunteer reporters, so called Citizen Science data, are increasingly available for species and regions that lack systematic surveys. However, it is unclear if or how much the biases in opportunistically collected data influence different habitat suitability modelling methods and hence if they can be used with confidence to address different conservation questions. We evaluated habitat suitability models with opportunistically collected observations against models with systematically collected observations for a forest bird species, the Siberian jay (Perisoreus infaustus) in Sweden. Citizen Science data were obtained from the Swe…