Guidelines for Systematic Review in Conservation and Environmental Management

Abstract

An increasing number of applied disciplines are utilizing evidence-based frameworks to review and disseminate the effectiveness of management and policy interventions. The rationale is that increased accessibility of the best available evidence will provide a more efficient and less biased platform for decision making. We argue that there are significant benefits for conservation in using such a framework, but the scientific community needs to undertake and disseminate more systematic reviews before the full benefit can be realized. We devised a set of guidelines for undertaking formalized systematic review, based on a health services model. The guideline stages include planning and conducting a review, including protocol formation, search strategy, data inclusion, data extraction, and analysis. Review dissemination is addressed in terms of current developments and future plans for a Web-based open-access library. By the use of case studies we highlight critical modifications to guidelines for protocol formulation, data-quality assessment, data extraction, and data synthesis for conservation and environmental management. Ecological data presented significant but soluble challenges for the systematic review process, particularly in terms of the quantity, accessibility, and diverse quality of available data. In the field of conservation and environmental management there needs to be further engagement of scientists and practitioners to develop and take ownership of an evidence-based framework.

The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States

“…Systematic reviews like ours, which includes protocol formulation, a data search strategy, data inclusion criteria, data extraction and formal quantitative analyses 22 , are scarce for other anthropogenic mortality sources. 21 Increased rigour of mortality estimates should be a high priority and will allow increased comparability of mortality sources 23 .…”

Is research keeping up with changes in landscape policy? A review of the literature

“…The review approach adopted draws on methodological ideas presented in guidelines for producing systematic reviews from evidence-based conservation (Centre for Evidence-Based Conservation, 2010;Fazey et al, 2004Fazey et al, , 2005Pullin and Stewart, 2006). Such methods aim to increase rigour during the process of: (1) searching for appropriate studies; (2) deciding whether individual studies should be included in a review, and (3) integrating information from different studies (Centre for Evidence-Based Conservation, 2010).…”

Index for Characterizing Post-Fire Soil Environments in Temperate Coniferous Forests

“…To develop and evaluate our soil index, we used a modified version of Pullin and Stewart's [26] three-stage approach: (1) formulate key questions to inform the search, inclusion, and rejection of criteria; (2) conduct a systematic review and synthesis of the relevant literature; and (3) report the resulting indices.…”