BACKGROUND Human actions have long been known to drive declines in nature, and there
is growing awareness of how globalization means that these drivers increasingly act at a …

Traditional approaches to reviewing literature may be susceptible to bias and result in
incorrect decisions. This is of particular concern when reviews address policy-and practice …

Reliable synthesis of the various rapidly expanding bodies of evidence is vital for the
process of evidence-informed decision-making in environmental policy, practice and …

Protected areas (PAs) are fundamental for biodiversity conservation, yet their impacts on
nearby residents are contested. We synthesized environmental and socioeconomic …

Google Scholar (GS), a commonly used web-based academic search engine, catalogues
between 2 and 100 million records of both academic and grey literature (articles not formally …

An important part of conservation practice is the empirical evaluation of program and policy
impacts. Understanding why conservation programs succeed or fail is essential for …

Review articles can provide valuable summaries of the ever‐increasing volume of primary
research in conservation biology. Where findings may influence important resource …

Thus far, most systematic reviews commissioned to inform international development policy
have focused on questions of 'what works', drawing on experimental and quasi-experimental …

One of the basic purposes of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation
interventions is to achieve conservation impact, the sum of avoided biodiversity loss and …

Protected areas are controversial because they are so important for conservation and
because they distribute fortune and misfortune unevenly. The nature of that distribution, as …