News update from Conservation Evidence

This blog post is an overview of recent and ongoing activities involving the Conservation Evidence team. Please follow the links, or contact us, if you want to know more about any of our work.

Conference: Delivering Effective Conservation Practice

Our conference at the start of the year, co-hosted with the Centre for Science and Policy and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, was attended by 132 in person and 394 online, including practitioners, funders, policy makers and others. The day was opened with a presentation by Anjali Goswami, Defra Chief Scientist, followed by 16 presentations (all available here) from funders, practitioners, policy makers and academics covering a range of aspects on improving conservation including the use of AI, the importance of social science, improving funding and embedding tests in practice. Its success resulted in a demand to make it a regular event. 

The day prior to the conference there was a series of workshops for 40 practitioner and funder Evidence Champions and 8 chief scientists of the conservation bodies of the national and devolved states (Natural England, NatureScot, Natural Resources Wales, Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs – Northern Ireland).These discussed a set of issues, such as how to AI can be embedded into practice, how to improve the effectiveness of funding, and how to embed evidence into policy making. 

You can read reflections on the conference in previous blog posts: from the perspective of practitioners, funders and policy makers.

Building the evidence base 🏗️ 💧 🐟

This underpins all our other work. Our online Conservation Evidence database now reviews the evidence on an impressive 4,120 actions (9,550 studies summarized) following publication of a synopsis on the Conservation of Vegetation in Inland Aquatic Habitats and the Habitat Restoration and Creation chapter of a synopsis on Fish Conservation in Inland Habitats. 

We also recently uploaded 110 studies (216 summaries) for Kelp Conservation (Blog post) and collated evidence for the management of ditches for biodiversity.

We are starting to collate the evidence for other marine vegetation such as seagrasses, and are progressing well with a much-needed update of the Bee Conservation synopsis.

Delivering the evidence to inform pollinator restoration in Europe 🐝

As part of the RestPoll project, funded under EU Horizon Europe (project 101082102), we contributed to a policy brief on restoring pollinators in Europe, which you can read here. Drawing on evidence from our Butterfly and Moth synopsis that was published in 2023, we were able to provide science-based assessments of the effectiveness of a range of policy-relevant conservation and restoration actions. These assessments were combined with an expert elicitation process to inform a set of policy recommendations, which include restoring and connecting habitats, reducing high land-use intensity practices (including chemical inputs), and enabling effective implementation through engaging stakeholders and providing financial and technical support.

Excitingly, as part of this work we deployed our newly developed approach to evidence assessment, which allows us to recombine evidence sources and provide bespoke assessments of user-defined conservation actions. Watch this space for more details soon!

A new process for generating synopses

We have developed bespoke software to significantly improve efficiency at each stage involved in synthesizing evidence to create a synopsis, from inviting and receiving input from the advisory board, to writing summaries and creating the final synopsis. We hope this will be operational very soon!

Using AI to extract and summarize evidence 💻

Our work, in collaboration with the Computer Science Department and the University Library, has achieved significant milestones. We continue to develop our Evidence Pipeline, which has screened about 250 million papers to identify those potentially relevant to Conservation Evidence, and significant steps have been made to develop Large Language Models (LLMs) to traceably identify and extract key information from articles (Jaffer et al., 2025). We have just been awarded funding from ai@CAM to build a prototype Chatbot agent as part of their AI-deas Sprint Programme, building on our work enabling more intuitive interaction with the Conservation Evidence database for decision making (Iyer et al. 2024).

Considering the impacts of AI for conservation and evidence synthesis

We recently co-founded the Ai4Nature Alliance, a thinktank/action platform bringing together academia, government, business and tech, to represent the nature sector’s concerns and enthusiasms for the use of AI. Our publication ‘Will AI speed up literature reviews or derail them entirely?’ has been cited to support IUCN Motion 143 ‘Developing An IUCN Policy and Guidance On Artificial Intelligence and Conservation, and The Integrity of Digital Evidence’ at the IUCN World Conservation Congress 2025. This motion will compel the creation of an IUCN Strategic, Ethical and Ecological Framework for AI, to be developed through an interdisciplinary process involving the Commissions, Members, and field partners.

Going forward, we are keen to collaborate with others to provide access to our Living Evidence Database and so greatly speed up reviews. Our model is that ‘evidence brokers’ based in the Conservation Evidence team can work in collaboration with organizations.

20 years of evidence-based conservation 🎂

Our team has led or contributed to several papers in the British Ecological Society’s special issue to mark 20 years of evidence-based conservation.

In one paper, Nigel Taylor et al. reflect on the evidence base for evidence-based conservation itself – a topic that is ironically rarely addressed but that we’re often asked about. This perspective piece tries to give a balanced view. We outline the logic for how evidence can improve conservation effectiveness or cost-effectiveness, and highlight some case studies where it has clearly done so. But we also caution that evidence-based conservation doesn’t always improve outcomes (especially if not carried out correctly) and that the appropriate level of investment in evidence-based conservation will vary depending on the decision context.

In another paper, Tom White et al. outline the importance and multiple benefits of evidence-based practice for consultancies, detail the approach to evidence use in The Biodiversity Consultancy, and outline key recommendations and lessons learned from this approach.

Finally Manuela Gonzalez-Suarez et al. explore the value of evidence for decision-making to support tetrapod conservation – there’s a separate blog post about that here.

Evidence-based guidance for practitioners ➡️

We view guidance as key to a better integration of evidence in decision-making but our work has shown existing guidance is often inadequate as it rarely is transparently based on and related to research and is often outdated or even wrong. Following publication of the first in our Conservation Guidance Series ‘Restoration, creation and management of salt marshes and tidal flats: A collation of evidence-based  guidance’, based on co-produced principles for evidence-based guidance (translated into Chinese, Korean and Arabic), we are now writing collated guidance on habitat restoration in inland waters for fish, using the evidence from our recently published fish synopsis and with input from a board of practitioners and experts. 

Conservation Testing Lab

We continue to look for opportunities to set up a small Conservation Testing Lab that helps identify, deliver, and maximise the learning from experimental tests. The aim is for this to be developed and run in direct collaboration with funders and practitioners to provide bespoke testing advice on specific projects and create open-access training materials to make it easier for practitioners to run their own tests. In July this year we will start to produce guidance on designing robust tests of actions. If you are interested in collaborating to develop the Testing Lab please get in touch.

The Conservation Evidence Journal 📖

The Conservation Evidence Journal provides an outlet for practitioners to publish results of tests of actions. Topics of recent papers include the reintroduction and conservation of hard-ground swamp deer in India and reinforcing eel populations in Canada. 

Evidence Champion Programme 🏆

Over the last year, two practitioner and four funder organisations have signed Evidence Champion agreements committing to evidence-based practice: Essex Wildlife Trust, Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, Arcadia, the Conservation Collective, East Suffolk Trust and Elgol Fund for Nature. An additional six practitioner and two funder organisations are currently revising applications and 14 practitioner and six funder organisations are considering applying. We are also continuing work with the Wildlife Trusts on the ‘Evidence Emergency’ project to ultimately engage all 47 Trusts with evidence use and generation. Do get in touch if you are interested in finding out more/joining.

Funders and philanthropists supporting evidence use & generation 💵

We continue to expand the group of funders and philanthropists who we collaborate with and who we see as key to improving conservation practice. 

Eighteen conservation funders co-authored a paper: ‘Approaches for integrating evidence of the effectiveness of actions in conservation funding to inspire more effective practice’. 

Twenty-five funders have identified means of improving the effectiveness of the work they fund through the generation of evidence. Their new paper, coordinated by Conservation Evidence, describes 11 approaches for embedding tests, depending on the scale, process, and type of funding.