Evaluating Impact Using Time-Series Data

Abstract

Ecologists have called for more robust studies on the impact of conservation interventions, or environmental shocks, on outcomes of interest, such as populations, habitat loss, or pressures. Time-series data are increasingly available and can, if appropriately analysed, allow such causal inferences.

Representation of global change drivers across biodiversity datasets

“…2) Statistical weightings have been used to adjust the representativeness of the data sample e.g., by up-weighting under-represented regions or taxa (e.g., as employed by the Living Planet Index 82 and often with citizen science data 31,73 ) but this approach can over emphasize the effect of very small portions of the overall data 83 and potentially inflate errors associated with those data 36,60,83,84 . 3) Bias can be explicitly modelled using fixed effects for continuous variables of driver intensity and random effects to represent geographic, temporal and taxonomic structure (e.g., as in 85 ), but care must be taken to ensure all uncertainties are propagated through to the global mean estimate [86][87][88][89] .…”

“…A lot of the focus in the literature is on filling geographic 24,26,32,34 , temporal 24,26,36,37 , and taxonomic 33,37,38 biodiversity data gaps, but this focus should be shifted towards prioritizing regions that undersample global change. For example, we are currently lacking biodiversity data from places with high magnitudes of climate change including Arctic and boreal forest regions, as well as tropical regions that are currently entering non-analog climate spac 90 .…”

“…To upscale the findings of syntheses of local-scale data to estimates of global or mean biodiversity change, the underlying data should be representative across multiple dimensions: space, time, taxonomic variation, as well as variation in the drivers of biodiversity change [32][33][34][35] . There is already recognition of the biases associated with space and geography 24,26,32,34 , time and historical baselines 24,26,36,37 and taxonomy 33,37,38 . In contrast, sampling biases with respect to drivers of change are rarely emphasized in the existing literature (but see 39 for spatio-taxonomic biases in North American butterfly occurrence records).…”

Guidelines for planning and monitoring corporate biodiversity performance

“…Companies will also need to plan, budget and implement impact evaluations (to measure the intended and unintended causal effects of conservation interventions, with emphasis on longterm impacts) and systematic reviews (to review research findings and assess evidence on the impacts of conservation interventions) [28,122]. If applied in an appropriate way, methods such as a before-after-control-impact (BACI) approach [123,124]…”

Monitoring should not be a barrier to conservation success: a response to Sanders et al.

“…Impact evaluations (e.g. Gertler et al, 2016), including the use of randomized control trials (Pyengar et al, 2021) and before after control intervention analyses (Wauchope et al, 2021), can then be implemented to measure a project's success against counterfactuals that enhance attribution of results from project actions. As Sanders et al note, progress is not always fast or linear, but that does not obviate the necessity and the usefulness of applying existing management best practices and evaluation techniques.…”