Protected area effectiveness and management indicators do not correlate: what are we doing wrong?

Protected areas are one of the key tools for conserving biodiversity and recent studies have highlighted the impact they can have in avoiding habitat conversion, finding that protected areas in general are effective, yet that this varies with governance regimes (Schleicher et al. 2017) and over time (Eklund et al. 2016). However, the relationship to management actions on the ground is far less studied (Coad et al. 2015) and we currently do not know which management actions are crucial for success. To investigate this in a challenging socio-ecological environment, we studied the effectiveness of the protected area network of Madagascar; a country with high deforestation rates and an unstable…