Many protected areas conduct awareness-raising activities to increase local knowledge and support conservation programmes, but the effectiveness of such activities is rarely assessed. Public awareness-raising has been carried out since the early 2000s around Bawangling National Nature Reserve, Hainan, China, to improve conservation knowledge about the Critically Endangered Hainan gibbon Nomascus hainanus, one of the rarest mammals. We conducted 207 interviews in 25 villages around Bawangling National Nature Reserve to evaluate the outcome of previous conservation education, through comparison of variation in local respondent knowledge and attitudes, and specific enquiries about sources of knowledge acquisition. Likelihood of accurate responses to most of our questions regarding the species was positively correlated with local exposure to gibbon-themed billboards and murals, and respondents exhibited greater knowledge about several key conservation indices for gibbons compared to their knowledge about sympatrically occurring rhesus macaques Macaca mulatta. Many respondents specifically reported they knew about local existence, population size, conservation status, and threats to gibbons from past awareness-raising activities, with village education sessions and billboards widely identified as key sources of information. However, other known awareness-raising approaches have had little detectable effect on shaping local conservation awareness. Although educational activities have improved awareness about gibbons and their conservation requirements in relative terms, overall levels of knowledge remain low in many important areas and ongoing improvement of local awareness is still needed, in particular around poorly-understood topics such as gibbon conservation status, rarity and threats, and for socio-demographic groups possessing less conservation knowledge.

Conservation research is less often applied in practice than is desirable for the optimization of conservation outcomes. We evaluated this conservation research–practice gap for a threatened passerine, Dupont's lark Chersophilus duponti. We reviewed the literature and classified the conservation interventions proposed by scientists as regulation and legislation, monitoring and research, or management. We sent a questionnaire to managers responsible for species conservation, to gather information about the reasons for implementing, or not, each conservation intervention. We found 16 conservation interventions proposed in the literature, of which 13 (81.2%) had been applied by managers at least once. We found a disparity between the frequency of scientific recommendations and the actions implemented by managers: some measures with high scientific consensus were rarely adopted, whereas approaches less frequently proposed by scientists were more often implemented by managers. Regulatory and monitoring/research interventions were applied more often than management interventions, probably because of legal obligations. Management interventions were less frequently implemented, mainly because of time and budget limitations. There was a negative correlation between the number of interventions implemented and the population trend of the species in each region, which suggests that conservation interventions were more commonly implemented when the species was facing local extinction. Our results indicate a mismatch between science and practice for the conservation of Dupont's lark, the reasons for which seem to be diverse and include factors such as financial and time limitations, legal obstacles and managers' perception of extinction risk. An iterative dialogue needs to be initiated between scientists and managers to evaluate the efficacy of interventions implemented, and facilitate evidence-based conservation.

A gap between research and management exists in numerous natural resource fields. This can lead to management actions that are based on experience rather than evidence and may be less effective as a result. The gap may be partly attributable to research not being relevant, timely or accessible for managers. Editorial boards of peer-reviewed journals are responsible for determining the relevance of submitted manuscripts for a journal's readership. Limited representation of natural resource managers on editorial boards may make it more difficult for journals to identify the topics and findings of most relevance for management, thus contributing to the research–management gap. We quantified the representation of natural resource managers on the editorial boards of 79 conservation and applied natural resource journals. We found that 65% of editors were affiliated with universities, 13% with research institutions, 12% with government agencies and 3% with NGOs. On average, 9% of editors were affiliated with an agency or organization responsible for managing or regulating natural resources. The proportion of managers on editorial boards did not differ significantly between natural resource fields or with journal impact factor. Potential benefits of greater integration of managers into the research and publishing process include selection of research topics with greater relevance for management, clearer statements of the management implications of research studies, and more frequent publication of research evaluating the effectiveness of management interventions. Further study is needed to evaluate whether greater participation of managers in the editorial review process may contribute to achieving these benefits.

A growing literature argues for evidence-based conservation. This concept reflects a wider approach to policy-making and follows thinking in medicine, in which rigorous, objective analysis of evidence has contributed to widespread improvements in medical outcomes. Clearly, conservation decisions should be informed by the best information available. However, we identify issues relating to the type and sources of evidence commonly used and the way evidence-based conservation studies frame policy debate. In this paper we discuss two issues; firstly, we ask ‘what counts as evidence?’ (what is meant by evidence, and what kind of evidence is given credibility). We conclude that evidence-based conservation should adopt a broad definition of evidence to give meaningful space for qualitative data, and local and indigenous knowledge. Secondly, we ask ‘how does evidence count?’ (the relationship between evidence and the policy-making process). We conclude that there should be greater recognition that policy-making is a complex and messy process, and that the role of evidence in policy making can never be neutral. In the light of these issues we suggest some changes to build on developing practice under the title evidence-informed conservation. The change in terminology is subtle, yet it has profound implications in that it calls for a re-positioning and re-understanding of conservation science as one source of information among many for decision-makers.

There is increasing emphasis on the need for effective ways of sharing knowledge to enhance environmental management and sustainability. Knowledge exchange (KE) are processes that generate, share and/or use knowledge through various methods appropriate to the context, purpose, and participants involved. KE includes concepts such as sharing, generation, coproduction, comanagement, and brokerage of knowledge. This paper elicits the expert knowledge of academics involved in research and practice of KE from different disciplines and backgrounds to review research themes, identify gaps and questions, and develop a research agenda for furthering understanding about KE. Results include 80 research questions prefaced by a review of research themes. Key conclusions are: (1) there is a diverse range of questions relating to KE that require attention; (2) there is a particular need for research on understanding the process of KE and how KE can be evaluated; and (3) given the strong interdependency of research questions, an integrated approach to understanding KE is required. To improve understanding of KE, action research methodologies and embedding evaluation as a normal part of KE research and practice need to be encouraged. This will foster more adaptive approaches to learning about KE and enhance effectiveness of environmental management.

Benchmarking, the comparison of efficiency measures of an organization against those of other organizations, is widely used in industry, medical practice and agriculture as a means of learning where practice can be improved. This could be used by conservationists for routine repeatable activities, such as the treatment of invasive species or the survival rate of transplanted plants. We give three examples of the benefits of cross-site comparisons: grazing management in South Africa, husbandry of captive penguins and management of lagoons for wading birds. Benchmarking, by comparing effectiveness with others, is the initial stage in identifying weaknesses and leads on to learning how to improve through cross-site comparisons, comparisons with better performers or examination of the published literature. We suggest that the term best practice, which is often used as part of benchmarking, is unsuitable as it implies a comparison of all options, which rarely takes place, and it is subject to change as knowledge and techniques develop. An alternative term is current effective practice.

To use more effectively the limited resources available for conservation there is an urgent need to identify which conservation approaches are most likely to succeed. However, measuring conservation success is often difficult, as it is achieved outside the project time frame. Measures of implementation are often reported to donors to demonstrate achievement but it is unclear whether they really predict conservation success. We applied a conceptual framework and score-card developed by the Cambridge Conservation Forum (CCF) to a sample of 60 conservation activities to determine the predictive power of implementation measures versus measures of key outcomes (later steps in the models defined in the CCF tools). We show that assessing key outcomes is often more difficult than quantifying the degree of implementation of a project but that, while implementation is a poor predictor of success, key outcomes provide a feasible and much more reliable proxy for whether a project will deliver real conservation benefits. The CCF framework and evaluation tool provide a powerful basis for synthesizing past experience and, with wider application, will help to identify factors that affect the success of conservation activities.

Understanding the nature and role of experiential knowledge for environmental conservation is a necessary step towards understanding if it should be used and how it might be applied with other types of knowledge in an evidence-based approach. This paper describes the nature of experiential and expert knowledge. It then discusses the role of experiential knowledge as a complement to scientific knowledge and explains the interplay between experiential knowledge with conservation research and practice using a simple conceptual model of how individuals learn. There are five main conclusions: (1) because experiential knowledge will always play a role in decision-making, enhancing ability to learn from experiences (including research) will have a significant influence on the effectiveness of conservation outcomes; (2) while experiential knowledge is qualitatively very different from quantitative information, both are important and complementary; (3) some experiential knowledge can be expressed quantitatively, but experiential knowledge can be difficult to isolate as single facts or propositions and qualitative methods will therefore often be required to elicit experiential knowledge; (4) because each person's expertise is unique, when using experiential knowledge the extent of a person's experience and its relevance to a particular problem need to be specified; and (5) as with any form of knowledge, there are limitations to that derived from personal experience. Synthesis and communication of research is therefore essential to help prevent erroneous thinking and, where possible, experiential knowledge should be used in conjunction with other types of information to guide conservation actions.

To ensure that the best scientific evidence is available to guide conservation action, effective mechanisms for communicating the results of research are necessary. In medicine, an evidence-based approach assists doctors in applying scientific evidence when treating patients. The approach has required the development of new methods for systematically reviewing research, and has led to the establishment of independent organizations to disseminate the conclusions of reviews. (1) Such methods could help bridge gaps between researchers and practitioners of environmental conservation. In medicine, systematic reviews place strong emphasis on reviewing experimental clinical trials that meet strict standards. Although experimental studies are much less common in conservation, many of the components of systematic reviews that reduce the biases when identifying, selecting and appraising relevant studies could still be applied effectively. Other methods already applied in medicine for the review of non-experimental studies will therefore be required in conservation. (2) Using systematic reviews and an evidence-based approach will only be one tool of many to reduce uncertainty when making conservation-related decisions. Nevertheless an evidence-based approach does complement other approaches (for example adaptive management), and could facilitate the use of the best available research in environmental management. (3) In medicine, the Cochrane Collaboration was established as an independent organization to guide the production and dissemination of systematic reviews. It has provided many benefits that could apply to conservation, including a forum for producing and disseminating reviews with emphasis on the requirements of practitioners, and a forum for feedback between researchers and practitioners and improved access to the primary research. Without the Cochrane Collaboration, many of the improvements in research communication that have occurred in medicine over the last decade would not have been possible.