Introduction
We would like to support you in your pursuit for effective solutions. All of our training material will be available online. This page includes helpful links for those interested in evidence-based conservation. Visit us regularly, read our blog, follow our social media accounts [Facebook \ Twitter] and subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay up to date.
Share what you’ve learned
We hope that you will support us in our aim to improve decisions in conservation by sharing what you have experienced here, by training your colleagues and telling others about the Conservation Evidence project. If you have specific feedback or questions about our resources then please fill in this form.
User training
This 25 minute video covers the basics of why and how to use evidence in conservation, the Conservation Evidence project, and generating your own evidence.
Monitoring and evaluation
If you are interested in evaluating your actions to provide useful evidence on what works and what doesn't, we would recommend that you check out the PRISM toolkit.
PRISM is a toolkit that aims to support small/medium-sized conservation projects to effectively evaluate the outcomes and impacts of their work.
The toolkit has been developed by a collaboration of several conservation NGOs with additional input from scientists and practitioners from across the conservation sector.
It can be found at https://conservationevaluation.org/
Another useful resource is The Conservation Handbook, which has information on ecological monitoring techniques.
Author training
These videos will arm you with essential skills for producing a synopsis of evidence in the style of Conservation Evidence, including how to find evidence, summarise evidence and assess evidence. These were recorded as part of our author training event in May 2017 held at the University of Cambridge in the David Attenborough Building.
1. Finding, summarising, and assessing evidence
This video provides a basic overview of the process for producing a synopsis of evidence in the style of Conservation Evidence.
2. What are interventions?
This video explores what a conservation intervention (or 'action') is, the kinds of study designs that test interventions and when is an experiment a controlled study?
3. How to find evidence and Subject-wide Evidence Synthesis
This video explores how to find evidence relevant to Conservation Evidence and our method of Subject-wide Evidence Synthesis. See what we’ve already searched here.
4a. How to summarise evidence
This video explores how to summarise evidence in the style of Conservation Evidence. This video offers advice on how to effectively communicate overall results from complex study designs.
4b. How to write in plain English
This video gives top tips on how to write in plain English and make your work easier to understand. Dr Lynn Dicks draws on her experience of being a science writer.
5. How to write key messages
This video gives top tips on how to write key messages in the style of Conservation Evidence.
6. How to use experts to assess evidence
This video explores how to use experts to assess evidence. The Delphi technique is demonstrated. This is the same method used for the assessments of evidence for What Works in Conservation.
7. Training others to use Conservation Evidence
This more informal video gives some hints and tips for training others to use Conservation Evidence. Watch out for the baby bats!
