Delivering Effective Conservation Practice – a view from a conservation practitioner
This blog post was written by Dr Jez Dagley MCIEEM, Director of Conservation, Essex Wildlife Trust. This is the second in a series of blog posts from our Delivering Effective Conservation Practice meeting, held in January 2026.
One of the challenges from attending conferences and workshops, away from the day job, is to absorb as much information and as many ideas as you can without being overwhelmed, and then to pick out those nuggets that you want to follow up. Crucially, somehow, you’ve then got to find time to pursue them and to reconnect with the people that you’ve met or heard speak. I must admit to not always being very successful at this, and time has often slipped by with ideas, and the energy they brought, dissipating like New Years’ resolutions. However, these days having access to YouTube videos of the conference is a boon, and this meeting has produced an excellently navigable compilation.
Day two of the Delivering Effective Conservation Practice meeting was full to the brim with nuggets, with 16 speakers across the day offering a fascinating and, for me, fresh range of perspectives on the how to approach the use of evidence in practice. The structure of the day, from the order and length of the presentations to their variety, seemed to have been carefully crafted – not just for the day itself but with an eye on the YouTube output.
Although, at first, the number and density of presentations seemed a little daunting on the day, with a short time for questions and a relatively brief lunch break, the recording makes for a hugely valuable reference source, with each presentation forming a compact visual chapter, full of “jumping off points” and links. I’m certain to dip into this recording many times over this coming year.
The morning session was anchored by Anjali Goswami (Chief Scientist, Defra), whose opening presentation discussed the reality of policy making at the UK Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs. Just 6-months into the job, she has the challenge of addressing and predicting future priorities while connecting up government thinking. The indefatigable Bill Sutherland (Cambridge University), whose energy and insight has driven so much of conservation evidence work in the last 20 years, further anchored the conference, reminding us of how far conservation still had to go to get beyond pure guesswork, when an intervention as supposedly “tried and tested” as the design of bird nest boxes is shown to be entirely sub-optimal. Although Bill also gave a warning about a new phenomenon of ‘evidence-washing’ by organisations, his talk moved swiftly from anchor to springboard, finishing with the energising and optimistic conclusion that questioning of evidence is already making a better world.
As a practitioner, there were fresh ideas provided by the funders’ perspectives, from Caroline Fiennes (Giving Evidence) and Tiago de Zoeten (Mossy Earth). Caroline urged us to concentrate effort on diagnosing a problem correctly and to keep it simple by using already-available evidence and applying it before planning any interventions. She reminded us that most impacts are likely to be small, that sample size matters and that funders should not incentivise wasteful research. Tiago picked up the theme of sample size as something to be tackled head-on and that should shape new approaches. For me, one of the most important parts of his talk was the recommendation to move away from traditional statistical approaches, with null hypothesis testing, and concentrate on the effect size and the more intuitive Bayesian approach.
Julia Jones (Bangor University) with her talk on the causal revolution, continued the theme of choosing the right design for the burgeoning quantities of data, remembering “assumptions are everything” and using good design coupled with post-project evaluation to avoid a ‘causal salad’ of data. Julia touched on the power of geospatial foundational models like TESSERA and Anil Madhavapeddy (Cambridge University) then took us on an enthusiastic journey through AI and new technologies, explaining the startling resolution and energy-saving power of the pre-trained TESSERA geospatial model, with its 128-dimensional, temporal-spectral images of 10m2 tiles of the Earth. TESSERA is something I certainly want to investigate and there is more on these models in a previous blog post.
For those of us at the conference centre in the capacious if chilly surroundings (the heating had broken down) of the Pembroke College Auditorium chapel, lunchtime allowed some in-depth discussion. I gained some valuable insights into current applied conservation research at Cambridge, with two more intervention tests for me to follow up – on ponds and bumblebees! Following lunch we returned to the theme of funding and the growing importance of evidence to funders. Nancy Ockendon outlined the pioneering Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme (ELSP), with its very broad geographic spread across the whole of Europe. Nancy described the structured application process, actively helping applicants shift to an evidence-checking culture and peer-reviewed evaluations. I can vouch for this cultural shift and how exciting it is to be part of it – with the Transforming the Thames project that is being funded by ELSP covering some of our Trust’s new coastal projects.
Shaping evidence culture segued nicely into Sally Hayns’ assessment, from her position at the helm of CIEEM, of the current culture of evidence in the consultant ecologists’ profession. These are tough times for such consultants and Sally addressed both the issues of morale and the difficulties for consultants in trying to use good scientific evidence to develop effective mitigations, in the face of the paucity of up-to-date good practice guidance. CIEEM is changing the approach to evidence and in doing so has grasped the nettle (and costs) of providing new evidence-based guidance.
Also grasping nettles, Craig Bennett (CEO, The Wildlife Trusts) explored the necessity of urgently changing the political narrative about wildlife conservation and championing evidence, amidst what the Wildlife Trusts have termed the ‘evidence emergency’. He emphasised the importance of getting one step ahead, preparing evidence to create a “good populism” for nature.
On a similar theme, came Jeremy Wilson‘s (Director of Science, RSPB) exposition of how the innovative and rigorous testing of interventions has underpinned the RSPB’s conservation work for the last 30 years, with 5% of the charity’s spending on conservation going into scientific research. Prioritisation of species – with Red and Amber Lists – has been at the core of deciding on spending and working closely with reserves managers has been another strength to its research programme.
As a practitioner, working for a Wildlife Trust, as a member of CIEEM, and having once worked (albeit briefly) for the RSPB, I had deep satisfaction and much pride in listening to these three talks set at the heart of such a conference.
With the late afternoon session came an exploration of metrics. E.J. Milner-Gulland (University of Oxford) expounded on the need for businesses to go ‘nature positive’ and to develop strategies to deal with uncertainty, not allowing it to become a showstopper. Jake Fiennes (Conservation Manager, Holkham Estate) also illustrated how to be positive and prevent over-prescriptive agri-environment rules getting in the way. I was impressed by how he had simplified potentially obscure natural capital assessment metrics and created a visual, EPC-type approach (as used to score the energy efficiency of household appliances) to recording biodiversity gains on farmland, which had motivated and enthused investors and landowners alike.
At the other end of this spectrum of metrics, Sallie Bailey (Chief Scientist, Natural England) then presented Natural England’s framework on science, evidence and analysis and chosen Areas of Research Interest. Outputs from the multi-partner Natural Capital & Ecosystem Assessment (NCEA) provide powerful new evidence and the latest data on the carbon sequestration of hedges was particularly interesting to me.
David Righton (Lead Scientist, Cefas) covered the problems of retrieving usable data from the marine environment and quantifying the hidden ecosystem services of the seas. He reported that there is a strong consensus across government, institutes and industries about the degraded state of the marine ecosystem. However, there is not agreement on the shape and scale of action and David ended with a call for cross-sector collaborations on interventions. Coming from Essex, I am already witnessing such marine collaborations, especially around the Beneficial Use of Dredged Sediments (BUDS) and restoration of oyster beds (supported, as it happens, by the ELSP – see Nancy Ockendon’s presentation above), where industry and conservation NGOs are actively working together. So, I’m optimistic that this area of conservation evidence is already growing.
The conference was rounded off with two examinations of how we should acknowledge human behaviour in conservation decision-making. Mark Burgman (University of Hawaiʻi and Editor of Conservation Biology) provided an entertaining and eye-opening analysis of expertise and expert advice. He made a compelling a case to stop relying on single expert pronouncements and instead using structured, diverse groups of people to assess evidence and judge future actions, using a clear protocol for cross-examination and aggregation of opinions.
Diogo Veríssimo (University of Oxford) also demonstrated the risk of cognitive bias and called on us all to take the science in social science seriously, paying attention to how people learn and change behaviours. He exhorted us to share our work from our marketing and comms teams and our qualitative interventions for species, as well as purely quantitative results.
Lynn Dicks (University of Cambridge) ended the day by posing the following question to the audience: What will you take back into your workplaces, institutions and networks which will make conservation more effective in 2026? Fourteen attendees from a wide range of organisations shared their thoughts. For my part, I responded that Essex Wildlife Trust would be engaging with local authorities to ensure that evidence is actively used when designing mitigation, and foremost amongst this would be the evidence gathered as part of the Essex Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS). In two years, or so, there will be a new Mayoral Authority for Essex, and we need to make sure this is resourced appropriately to scrutinise mitigation proposals.
Thanks to the Conservation Evidence Group, Cambridge Centre for Science & Policy and Pembroke College, Cambridge for hosting this stimulating conference.
Conservation Evidence acknowledges financial support from the University of Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy Policy Innovation Fund.
