Ethical considerations when conservation research involves people

Social science is becoming increasingly important in conservation, with more studies involving methodologies that collect data from and about people. Conservation science is a normative and applied discipline designed to support and inform management and practice. Poor research practice risks harming participants and, researchers, and can leave negative legacies. Often, those at the forefront of field-based research are early-career researchers, many of whom enter their first research experience ill-prepared for the ethical conundrums they may face. We draw on our own experiences as early-career researchers to illuminate how ethical challenges arise during conservation research that involves human participants. Specifically, we considered ethical review procedures, conflicts of values, and power relations, and devised broad recommendations on how to navigate ethical challenges when they arise during research. In particular, we recommend researchers apply reflexivity (i.e., thinking that allows researchers to recognize the effect researchers have on the research) to help navigate ethical challenges and encourage greater engagement with ethical review processes and the development of ethical guidelines for conservation research that involves human participants. Such guidelines must be accompanied by the integration of rigorous ethical training into conservation education. We believe our experiences are not uncommon and can be avoided and hope to spark discussion to contribute to a more socially just conservation.     

A critical appraisal of population viability analysis

Population viability analysis (PVA) is useful in management of imperiled species. Applications range from research design, threat assessment, and development of management frameworks. Given the importance of PVAs, it is essential that they be rigorous and adhere to widely accepted guidelines; however, the quality of published PVAs is rarely assessed. We evaluated the quality of 160 PVAs of 144 species of birds and mammals published in peer-reviewed journals from 1990 to 2017. We hypothesized that PVA quality would be lower with generic programs than with custom-built programs; be higher for those developed for imperiled species; change over time; and be higher for those published in journals with high impact factors (IFs). Each included study was evaluated based on answers to an evaluation framework containing 32 questions reflecting whether and to what extent the PVA study adhered to published PVA guidelines or contained important PVA components. All measures of PVA quality were generally lower for studies based on generic programs. Conservation status of the species did not affect any measure of PVA quality, but PVAs published in high IF journals were of higher quality. Quality generally declined over time, suggesting the quantitative literacy of PVA practitioners has not increased over time or that PVAs developed by unskilled users are being published in peer-reviewed journals. Only 18.1% of studies were of high quality (score >75%), which is troubling because poor-quality PVAs could misinform conservation decisions. We call for increased scrutiny of PVAs by journal editors and reviewers. Our evaluation framework can be used for this purpose. Because poor-quality PVAs continue to be published, we recommend caution while using PVA results in conservation decision making without thoroughly assessing the PVA quality.     

Priority areas for conservation of and research focused on terrestrial vertebrates

Effective conservation policies require comprehensive knowledge of biodiversity. However, knowledge shortfalls still remain, hindering possibilities to improve decision making and built such policies. During the last 2 decades, conservationists have made great efforts to allocate resources as efficiently as possible but have rarely considered the idea that if research investments are also strategically allocated, it would likely fill knowledge gaps while simultaneously improving conservation actions. Therefore, prioritizing areas where both conservation and research actions could be conducted becomes a critical endeavor that can further maximize return on investment. We used Zonation, a conservation planning tool and geographical distributions of amphibians, birds, mammals, and reptiles to suggest and compare priority areas for conservation and research of terrestrial vertebrates worldwide. We also evaluated the degree of human disturbance in both types of priority areas by describing the value of the human footprint index within such areas. The spatial concordance between priority conservation and research areas was low: 0.36% of the world's land area. In these areas, we found it would be possible to protect almost half of the currently threatened species and to gather information on nearly 42% of data-deficient (DD) species. We also found that 6199 protected areas worldwide are located in such places, although only 35% of them have strict conservation purposes. Areas of consensus between conservation and research areas represent an opportunity for simultaneously conserving and acquiring knowledge of threatened and DD species of vertebrates. Although the picture is not the most encouraging, joint conservation and research efforts are possible and should be fostered to save vertebrate species from our own ignorance and extinction.     

From conference abstract to publication in the conservation science literature

Every 2 years, the conservation community comes together at The Society for Conservation Biology's International Congress for Conservation Biology (ICCB) to share new developments in conservation science and practice. Publication of findings presented at conferences in scientific journals adds to the permanent record and helps increase the potential impact of the work presented. However, quantitative research on publication rates for meetings relevant to conservation is lacking. For the 25th ICCB, (Auckland, New Zealand in 2011), we examined study publication rates and presenter demographics, recorded titles, number of authors, presenter affiliations, gender, country of the study region, publication status, and elapsed time between presentation and publication. Of the 980 contributions (782 talks and 198 posters), 587 (60%) were published as peer-reviewed journal articles or book chapters. Mean time to publication was 13.7 months for all presentation abstracts and 21.3 months excluding abstracts with corresponding articles that were published before the meeting. The gender breakdown of presenters was almost even (53% male, 47% female), but representation of the countries where the presenting authors were based was skewed. The political units with the most contributions were by far the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Presenters based in 16 different English-speaking countries made up 74% of the total sample, but this did not influence the likelihood of their abstract leading to a publication. Examination of conference presenters and publication of their presentations is useful to identify biases and potential challenges that need to be addressed to make conference communications permanent and increase their reach beyond conference attendees.     

Growth of non-English-language literature on biodiversity conservation

English is widely recognized as the language of science, and English-language publications (ELPs) are rapidly increasing. It is often assumed that the number of non-ELPs is decreasing. This assumption contributes to the underuse of non-ELPs in conservation science, practice, and policy, especially at the international level. However, the number of conservation articles published in different languages is poorly documented. Using local and international search systems, we searched for scientific articles on biodiversity conservation published from 1980 to 2018 in English and 15 non-English languages. We compared the growth rate in publications across languages. In 12 of the 15 non-English languages, published conservation articles significantly increased every year over the past 39 years, at a rate similar to English-language articles. The other three languages showed contrasting results, depending on the search system. Since the 1990s, conservation science articles in most languages increased exponentially. The variation in the number of non-English-language articles identified among the search systems differed markedly (e.g., for simplified Chinese, 11,148 articles returned with local search system and 803 with Scopus). Google Scholar and local literature search systems returned the most articles for 11 and 4 non-English languages, respectively. However, the proportion of peer-reviewed conservation articles published in non-English languages was highest in Scopus, followed by Web of Science and local search systems, and lowest in Google Scholar. About 20% of the sampled non-English-language articles provided no title or abstract in English; thus, in theory, they were undiscoverable with English keywords. Possible reasons for this include language barriers and the need to disseminate research in countries where English is not widely spoken. Given the known biases in statistical methods and study characteristics between English- and non-English-language studies, non-English-language articles will continue to play an important role in improving the understanding of biodiversity and its conservation.     

Sentiment analysis as a measure of conservation culture in scientific literature

Culturomics is emerging as an important field within science, as a way to measure attitudes and beliefs and their dynamics across time and space via quantitative analysis of digitized data from literature, news, film, social media, and more. Sentiment analysis is a culturomics tool that, within the last decade, has provided a means to quantify the polarity of attitudes expressed within various media. Conservation science is a crisis discipline; therefore, accurate and effective communication are paramount. We investigated how conservation scientists communicate their findings through scientific journal articles. We analyzed 15,001 abstracts from articles published from 1998 to 2017 in 6 conservation-focused journals selected based on indexing in scientific databases. Articles were categorized by year, focal taxa, and the conservation status of the focal species. We calculated mean sentiment score for each abstract (mean adjusted z score) based on 4 lexicons (Jockers-Rinker, National Research Council, Bing, and AFINN). We found a significant positive annual trend in the sentiment scores of articles. We also observed a significant trend toward increasing negativity along the spectrum of conservation status categories (i.e., from least concern to extinct). There were some clear differences in the sentiments with which research on different taxa was reported, however. For example, abstracts mentioning lobe finned fishes tended to have high sentiment scores, which could be related to the rediscovery of the coelacanth driving a positive narrative. Contrastingly, abstracts mentioning elasmobranchs had low scores, possibly reflecting the negative sentiment score associated with the word shark. Sentiment analysis has applications in science, especially as it pertains to conservation psychology, and we suggest a new science-based lexicon be developed specifically for the field of conservation.     

Patterns of Citations of Open Access and Non‐Open Access Conservation Biology Journal Papers and Book Chapters

Abstract: Open access (OA) publishing, whereby authors, their institutions, or their granting bodies pay or provide a repository through which peer‐reviewed work is available online for free, is championed as a model to increase the number of citations per paper and disseminate results widely, especially to researchers in developing countries. We compared the number of citations of OA and non‐OA papers in six journals and four books published since 2000 to test whether OA increases number of citations overall and increases citations made by authors in developing countries. After controlling for type of paper (e.g., review or research paper), length of paper, authors’ citation profiles, number of authors per paper, and whether the author or the publisher released the paper in OA, OA had no statistically significant influence on the overall number of citations per journal paper. Journal papers were cited more frequently if the authors had published highly cited papers previously, were members of large teams of authors, or published relatively long papers, but papers were not cited more frequently if they were published in an OA source. Nevertheless, author‐archived OA book chapters accrued up to eight times more citations than chapters in the same book that were not available through OA, perhaps because there is no online abstracting service for book chapters. There was also little evidence that journal papers or book chapters published in OA received more citations from authors in developing countries relative to those journal papers or book chapters not published in OA. For scholarly publications in conservation biology, only book chapters had an OA citation advantage, and OA did not increase the number of citations papers or chapters received from authors in developing countries.     

A critical review of the compassionate conservation debate

Compassionate conservation holds that compassion should transform conservation. It has prompted heated debate and has been criticized strongly. We reviewed the debate to characterize compassionate conservation and to philosophically analyze critiques that are recurring and that warrant further critical attention. The necessary elements of compassionate conservation relate to the moral value of sentient animals and conservation and to science and conservation practice. Although compassionate conservation has several nontraditional necessary conditions, it also importantly allows a degree of pluralism in values and scientific judgment regarding animals and conservation practice. We identified 52 specific criticisms from 11 articles that directly critique compassionate conservation. We closely examined 33 of these because they recurred regularly or included substantial questions that required further response. Critics criticized compassionate conservation's ethical foundations, scientific credentials, clarity of application, understanding of compassion, its alleged threat to conservation and biodiversity. Some criticisms, we found, are question begging, confused, or overlook conceptual complexity. These criticisms raise questions for critics and proponents, regarding, for example, equal versus differential intrinsic moral value of different sentient animals (including humans), problems of natural and human-caused suffering of wild animals and predation, and the acceptability of specific conservation practices within compassionate conservation. By addressing recurring and faulty critiques of compassionate conservation and identifying issues for compassionate conservation to address, this review provides a clearer basis for crucial ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue about ethics, values, and conservation.     

Research methods and reporting practices in zoo and aquarium conservation-education evaluation

Zoos and aquariums are increasingly incorporating conservation education into their mission statements and visitor experiences to address global biodiversity loss. To advance knowledge and practice in the field, research is being conducted to evaluate the effect of zoo conservation-education experiences on visitor psychosocial outcomes (e.g., knowledge, attitude, emotions, motivations, behavior). Following recent discussions among scholars and practitioners concerning logistical and methodological challenges that likely undermine the conclusions of such research, we identified and reviewed the methods and reporting practices in peer-reviewed articles published in English from May 1998 to June 2016 that focused on adult visitor samples (47 articles, 48 studies). We examined elements of internal, external, construct, and statistical conclusion validity. Methodological quality of quantitative methods and reporting practices was determined using the Effective Public Health Practice Project Quality Assessment Tool. Each study was coded as either strong (no weak ratings), moderate (1 weak rating), or weak (≥2 weak ratings). The quantitative methods of 83.3% of studies were weak. The remaining 16.7% had methods of moderate quality. Using an existing checklist, we also assessed the quality and rigor of qualitative methods and reporting practices and found that some aspects of these methods were reported more comprehensively than others. For example, 69.6% of articles discussed methods for identifying key themes from the data, whereas only 34.8% reported how data verification was performed. We suggest increased application of intensive longitudinal methods (e.g., daily diary) to strengthen self-reported data, experimental and repeated-measures designs, and mixed-methods approaches. Our findings and recommendations could strengthen and guide the research and evaluation agenda for the field and ultimately enhance the contribution zoos make to global biodiversity conservation.     

Key considerations and challenges in the application of social-network research for environmental decision making

Attempts to better understand the social context in which conservation and environmental decisions are made has led to increased interest in human social networks. To improve the use of social-network analysis in conservation, we reviewed recent studies in the literature in which such methods were applied. In our review, we looked for problems in research design and analysis that limit the utility of network analysis. Nineteen of 55 articles published from January 2016 to June 2019 exhibited at least 1 of the following problems: application of analytical methods inadequate or sensitive to incomplete network data; application of statistical approaches that ignore dependency in the network; or lack of connection between the theoretical base, research question, and choice of analytical techniques. By drawing attention to these specific areas of concern and highlighting research frontiers and challenges, including causality, network dynamics, and new approaches, we responded to calls for increasing the rigorous application of social science in conservation.     

The virtue of compassion in compassionate conservation

The role of ethics is becoming an increasingly important feature of biodiversity conservation dialogue and practice. Compassionate conservationists argue for a prohibition of, or at least a strong presumption against, the adoption of conservation policies that intentionally harm animals. They assert that to be compassionate is to care about animals and that it is antithetical to caring for animals to intentionally harm them. Compassionate conservationists thus criticize many existing conservation practices and policies. Two things together challenge the philosophical foundation of compassionate conservation. First, compassionate conservationists ground their theory in virtue ethics, yet virtue ethics permits exceptions to moral rules, so there cannot be an in-principle prohibition on adopting intentional harm-inducing policies and practices. But not all compassionate conservationists advocate for a prohibition on intentionally harming animals, only a strong presumption against it. This leads to the second point: compassion can motivate a person to adopt a harm-inducing conservation policy or practice when doing so is the best available option in a situation in which animals will be harmed no matter what policy or practice is adopted. Combining these insights with the empirical observation that conservationists regularly find themselves in tragic situations, we arrive at the conclusion that conservationists may regularly advocate for harm-inducing policies and practices from a position of compassion. Article Impact Statement: Compassionate conservationists should accept that the virtuously compassionate person may adopt harm-causing conservation policies.     

Conservation lessons from taboos and trolley problems

Governments pass conservation laws, adopt policies, and make plans yet frequently fail to implement them. Implementation of conservation, however, often requires costly sacrifice: people foregoing benefit for the benefit of biodiversity. Decisions involve trade-offs with outcomes that depend on the values at stake and people's perceptions of those values. Psychology, ethics, and behavioral science have each addressed the challenge of making difficult, often tragic, trade-off decisions. Based on these literatures, values can be classified as secular or sacred, where sacred values are those for which compensation may be unthinkable (e.g., freedom). Taboo trade-offs emerge when secular values are pitted against sacred ones. These are difficult to discuss, much less negotiate. Confronting taboo trade-offs in conservation may require discursive approaches to better understand particular attributes of decisions that place sacred human values at risk. Tragic trade-offs emerge when sacred values are pitted against one another. The trolley problem—a forced choice between 2 unthinkable outcomes—is a simple heuristic illustrating ethical challenges of tragic trade-offs. Behavior studies illustrate that people have a strong aversion to losses where an active choice was made, resulting in a bias toward status quo decisions. Faced with tragic, trolley-problem-like choices, people tend to avoid taking responsibility for action, defer decisions, evade opinions on painful choices, and regret unfortunate outcomes of actions. To help close the implementation gap, conservation actors may need to directly address the psychological, ethical, and behavioral barriers created by the remorse, regret, and moral residue of implementing conservation choices that have tragic outcomes. Recognition of these predictable features of the human psyche may foster better administrative structures to support action with durable outcomes as well as new research directions.     

Application of decision tools to ethical analysis in biodiversity conservation

Achieving ethically responsible decisions is crucial for the success of biodiversity conservation projects. We adapted the ethical matrix, decision tree, and Bateson's cube to assist in the ethical analysis of complex conservation scenarios by structuring these tools so that they can implement the different value dimensions (environmental, social, and animal welfare) involved in conservation ethics. We then applied them to a case study relative to the decision-making process regarding whether or not to continue collecting biomaterial on the oldest of the two remaining northern white rhinoceroses (Ceratotherium simum cottoni), a functionally extinct subspecies of the white rhinoceros. We used the ethical matrix to gather ethical pros and cons and as a starting point for a participatory approach to ethical decision-making. We used decision trees to compare the different options at stake on the basis of a set of ethical desiderata. We used Bateson's cube to establish a threshold of ethical acceptability and model the results of a simple survey. The application of these tools proved to be pivotal in structuring the decision-making process and in helping reach a shared, reasoned, and transparent decision on the best option from an ethical point of view among those available.     

Emotion as a source of moral understanding in conservation

Recent debates around the meaning and implications of compassionate conservation suggest that some conservationists consider emotion a false and misleading basis for moral judgment and decision making. We trace these beliefs to a long-standing, gendered sociocultural convention and argue that the disparagement of emotion as a source of moral understanding is both empirically and morally problematic. According to the current scientific and philosophical understanding, reason and emotion are better understood as partners, rather than opposites. Nonetheless, the two have historically been seen as separate, with reason elevated in association with masculinity and emotion (especially nurturing emotion) dismissed or delegitimated in association with femininity. These associations can be situated in a broader, dualistic, and hierarchical logic used to maintain power for a dominant male (White, able-bodied, upper class, heterosexual) human class. We argue that emotion should be affirmed by conservationists for the novel and essential insights it contributes to conservation ethics. We consider the specific example of compassion and characterize it as an emotional experience of interdependence and shared vulnerability. This experience highlights conservationists’ responsibilities to individual beings, enhancing established and widely accepted beliefs that conservationists have a duty to protect populations, species, and ecosystems (or biodiversity). We argue compassion, thus understood, should be embraced as a core virtue of conservation.     

The ethics of genetic engineering and gene drives in conservation

The ethical issues associated with using genetic engineering and gene drives in conservation are typically described as consisting of risk assessment and management, public engagement and acceptance, opportunity costs, risk and benefit distributions, and oversight. These are important, but the ethical concerns extend beyond them because the use of genetic engineering has the potential to significantly alter the practices, concepts, and value commitments of conservation. I sought to elucidate the broader set of ethical issues connected with a potential genetic engineering turn in conservation and provide an approach to ethical analysis of novel conservation technologies. The primary rationales offered in support of using genetic engineering and gene drives in conservation are efficiency and necessity for achieving conservation goals. The instrumentalist ethical perspective associated with these rationales involves assessing novel technologies as a means to accomplish desired ends. For powerful emerging technologies the instrumentalist perspective needs to be complemented by a form-of-life perspective frequently applied in the philosophy of technology. The form-of-life perspective involves considering how novel technologies restructure the activities into which they are introduced. When the form-of-life perspective is applied to creative genetic engineering in conservation, it brings into focus a set of ethical issues, such as those associated with power, meaning, relationships, and values, that are not captured by the instrumentalist perspective. It also illuminates why the use of gene drives in conservation is so ethically and philosophically interesting.     

Global assessment of the biodiversity safeguards of development banks that finance infrastructure

Infrastructure development is a major driver of biodiversity loss globally. With upward of US$2.5 trillion in annual investments in infrastructure, the financial sector indirectly drives this biodiversity loss. At the same time, biodiversity safeguards (project-level biodiversity impact mitigation requirements) of infrastructure financiers can help limit this damage. The coverage and harmonization of biodiversity safeguards are important factors in their effectiveness and therefore warrant scrutiny. It is equally important to examine the extent to which these safeguards align with best-practice principles for biodiversity impact mitigation outlined in international policies, such as that of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. We assessed the biodiversity safeguards of public development banks and development finance institutions for coverage, harmonization, and alignment with best practice. We used Institute of New Structural Economics and Agence Française de Développement's global database to identify development banks that invest in high-biodiversity-footprint infrastructure and have over US$500 million in assets. Of the 155 banks, 42% (n = 65) had biodiversity safeguards. Of the existing safeguards, 86% (56 of 65) were harmonized with International Finance Corporation (IFC) Performance Standard 6 (PS6). The IFC PS6 (and by extension the 56 safeguard policies harmonized with it) had high alignment with international best practice in biodiversity impact mitigation, whereas the remaining 8 exhibited partial alignment, incorporating few principles that clarify the conditions for effective biodiversity offsetting. Given their dual role in setting benchmarks and leveraging private finance, infrastructure financiers in development finance need to adopt best-practice biodiversity safeguards if the tide of global biodiversity loss is to be stemmed. The IFC PS6, if strengthened, can act as a useful template for other financier safeguards. The high degree of harmonization among safeguards is promising, pointing to a potential for diffusion of practices.     

Speaking across boundaries to explore the potential for interdisciplinarity in ecosystem services knowledge production

Conservation is likely to be most successful if it draws on knowledge from across the natural and social sciences. The ecosystem services concept has been called a boundary object in that it facilitates development of such interdisciplinary knowledge because it offers a common platform for researchers, policy makers, and practitioners. However, a question that remains is to what extent the interdisciplinary knowledge needed is provided by disciplinary diversity within the field. We asked where is knowledge on ecosystem services produced, how interdisciplinary is this knowledge, and which disciplines facilitate the greatest disciplinary integration? We defined interdisciplinarity as the extent to which published research draws on knowledge that crosses disciplinary borders and used citations as a quantitative indicator of communication among disciplines, based on journal classification. We used disciplinary diversity, richness, and heterocitation as measures of interdisciplinarity and betweenness centrality as a measure of disciplinary integration. Our data set contained 22,153 publications on ecosystem services, published from 1983 to 2018. We found that ecosystem services research matured; average yearly output growth was 33.8%, more than the 8–9% growth in scientific output across all fields. Over time, the network clustering coefficient, measuring connectedness of individual disciplines, rose from 0.388 to 0.727, suggesting increased density in the network of citations. Researchers in the field published more articles (3566 in 2018 alone) across more disciplines (77 unique disciplines in 2018). However, this growth was not mirrored by an increase in the diversity (stable at 0.7–0.9) or richness (averaging 0.35 unique disciplines per citation) of citation patterns. Heterocitation scores, or out-of-group citations, for arts, humanities, social sciences, and law ranged from 56% to 64%, which was lower than we expected, although this may serve to protect the integrity of social science disciplines and attract broader engagement from within. Ultimately, a small number of productive disciplines are central to supporting disciplinary integration. However, opportunities exist for conservation practice to draw on a broader field of research, to realize the potential that the diverse body of knowledge of interdisciplinary work offers.     

Socioeconomic development and ecological traits as predictors of human–bird conflicts

Because of the significant impacts on both human interests and bird conservation, it is imperative to identify patterns and anticipate drivers of human–bird conflicts (HBCs) worldwide. Through a global systematic review, following the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, we analyzed the socioeconomic factors and bird ecological traits driving the degree of knowledge and extent of HBCs. We included 166 articles published from 1971 to 2020 in our analyses through which we built a profile of the socioeconomic conditions of 52 countries with reported conflicts and the ecological traits of the 161 bird species involved in HBCs. Although HBC expanded worldwide, it had the greatest impact in less-developed countries (estimate 0. 66 [SE 0.13], p< 0.05), where agriculture is critical for rural livelihoods. Species with a relatively greater conflict extent had a relatively broader diet (estimate 0.80 [SE 0.22], p<0.05) and an increasing population trend (estimate 0.58 [SE 0.15], p<0.05) and affected human interests, such as agriculture and livestock raising. In countries with greater biodiversity, HBCs caused greater socioeconomic impacts than in more developed countries. Our results highlight the importance of understanding and addressing HBCs from multiple perspectives (ecological, sociocultural, and political) to effectively protect both biodiversity and local livelihoods.     

When all life counts in conservation

Conservation science involves the collection and analysis of data. These scientific practices emerge from values that shape who and what is counted. Currently, conservation data are filtered through a value system that considers native life the only appropriate subject of conservation concern. We examined how trends in species richness, distribution, and threats change when all wildlife count by adding so-called non-native and feral populations to the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List and local species richness assessments. We focused on vertebrate populations with founding members taken into and out of Australia by humans (i.e., migrants). We identified 87 immigrant and 47 emigrant vertebrate species. Formal conservation accounts underestimated global ranges by an average of 30% for immigrants and 7% for emigrants; immigrations surpassed extinctions in Australia by 52 species; migrants were disproportionately threatened (33% of immigrants and 29% of emigrants were threatened or decreasing in their native ranges); and incorporating migrant populations into risk assessments reduced global threat statuses for 15 of 18 species. Australian policies defined most immigrants as pests (76%), and conservation was the most commonly stated motivation for targeting these species in killing programs (37% of immigrants). Inclusive biodiversity data open space for dialogue on the ethical and empirical assumptions underlying conservation science.