Why and how to bridge the gaps When it comes to evaluating the success of

field actions, ecosystem protection and biodiversity conservation lags behind many other policy fields (e.g. poverty reduction, minimal rehabilitation, disease control) (cf. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, MEA 2005a, b). However, if we want to ensure that the limited (financial) resources devoted to conservation make a practical this website difference, we should test conservation policies with equal thoroughness and state-of-the-art methods as we do in conservation science. Hereby, approaches PXD101 from various fields of science could help to improve the efficiency in conservation actions. Therefore, bridging the gaps between both fields would be synergistic. Based on the results from the questionnaires we make the

following suggestions to bridge the three gaps identified above. Stimulate mutual interaction and translation (overcoming the knowing-doing gap) There is a wealth of literature on expert elicitation, decision theory, and risk analysis—all of which can be important NVP-HSP990 order aspects of conservation—but technical terminology can be especially impenetrable to practitioners. In turn, field practitioners should document their field experiences and experiments in a manner that can meaningfully inform conservation scientists. To address this point, we asked all contributors to this special issue on European grasslands to (1) translate

their key-findings on short-term activities for conservation practitioners, (2) to separate long-term effects from short-term activities, and (3) to evaluate how the impact of the respective action (conservation efficiency) could be translated into the conservation practitioner’s language (see Table 1 in Appendix). Vorinostat mw Several authors commented in their questionnaire that a “Conservation Management Abstract”, a summary in which theoretical findings are being translated in specific conservation management advice, would be an important step in overcoming the “knowing-doing” gap. We therefore suggest that journals publishing studies relevant for the field of conservation should consider requiring a practical abstract that has to be open-access and published at the beginning of each article (e.g. just after the conventional abstract).