It seems like it is a high season for exciting papers on climate change and biodiversity. As results are usually more interesting in context of other results, I wanted to bring together some of the season’s highlights. Continue reading
Category Archives: Journal club
Meta-analysis in the world of systematic reviews
Paper by Scheper et al. 2013. Environmental factors driving the effectiveness of European agri-environmental measures in mitigating pollinator loss – a meta-analysis. Ecology Letters. DOI: 10.1111/ele.12128
Discussed at the Journal Club 14 June 2013
The Journal Club’s article was this time a meta-analysis. First, our PostDoc Anni kindly explained us the basic principles of meta-analysis. The article written by Scheper et al. followed the most common type of meta-analysis. The idea is to compare two sets of results, or two means (i.e. of species richness) and as a result you receive the proportional difference which is described as Hedges’ d. Continue reading
On protected area effectiveness
Many of the big conservation organizations use assessments to score protected area management effectiveness. Few of these evaluation approaches look directly at outcomes and how changes in these could be attributed to the existence of a protected area. Tools such as the Tracking Tool or RAPPAM are more assessing the management capacity of the PAs, such as adequacy of staff and budgets.
Nolte & Agrawal (2013 Cons Biol) test how well these types of measures link to the capacity of PAs to deliver real conservation outcomes. They use data from the Management Effectiveness Tracking Tool (METT) and look at how it relates to the effectiveness of PAs in reducing fire occurrence in the Amazon rainforest. They do it by applying matching methods, nowadays widely used to estimate PA effectiveness (Andam et al 2008 PNAS).