Article impact statement Values-based approaches like structured decision making successfully enable participation and inclusive conservation practice.

The Black Lives Matter Movement, which gained unprecedented global momentum in mid‐2020, triggered critical reflection on systemic discrimination of disadvantaged groups across many domains of society. It prompted us, as early‐career researchers (ECRs) in conservation science, to examine our own awareness of ongoing injustices within our field, the role we play in perpetuating or countering these injustices, and how to move forward. Colonialist ideologies and power dynamics throughout the history of conservation practice and research have left a long‐lasting legacy of inequality and systemic racism. While improvements have been made, these legacies continue to influence teaching and practice today. In this perspective piece, we reflect on the impacts of conservation’s colonial past and how the sector has developed. We then explore how current traditional routes into conservation, and the dominance of these approaches, can leave ECRs underprepared to address modern‐day conservation issues due to a limited understanding of conservation’s history and key theories from other fields. We end by offering a set of suggestions encouraging others to learn and practise fairer and more inclusive conservation practices. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Monitoring is needed to assess conservation success and improve management, but naïve or simplistic interpretation of monitoring data can lead to poor decisions. We illustrate how to counter this risk by combining decision-support tools and quantitative counterfactual analysis. We analyzed 20 years of egg rescue for tara iti (Sternula nereis davisae) in Aotearoa New Zealand. Survival is lower for rescued eggs; however, only eggs perceived as imminently threatened by predators or weather are rescued, so concluding that rescue is ineffective would be biased. Equally, simply assuming all rescued eggs would have died if left in situ is likely to be simplistic. Instead, we used the monitoring data itself to estimate statistical support for a wide space of uncertain counterfactuals about decisions and fate of rescued eggs. Results suggest under past management, rescuing and leaving eggs would have led to approximately the same overall fledging rate, because of likely imperfect threat assessment and low survival of rescued eggs to fledging. Managers are currently working to improve both parameters. Our approach avoids both naïve interpretation of observed outcomes and simplistic assumptions that management is always justified, using the same data to obtain unbiased quantitative estimates of counterfactual support.