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SUMMARY:Weighting evidence to save the planet: which studies should we tru
 st and why? - Alec Philip Christie\, Department of Zoology\, Cambridge Uni
 versity
DTSTART:20191127T110000Z
DTEND:20191127T120000Z
UID:TALK134791@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Mari Huhtala
DESCRIPTION:Efforts are currently underway in biodiversity conservation to
  emulate the successes of evidence-based medicine. The Conservation Eviden
 ce project aims to summarise the entire conservation literature relating t
 o quantitative tests of conservation actions (i.e. answering what works in
  conservation?). Oftentimes for a given conservation action we find that s
 ome studies will suggest it is effective\, whilst others suggest it is not
 . There is a great need to understand which studies we should trust when m
 aking decisions\, not only in conservation\, but also in other fields. In 
 my talk I will focus on my work to understand how experimental/study desig
 n affects the quality of studies (internal validity). Using simulations an
 d empirical analysis of 47 empirical datasets I show that less robust expe
 rimental designs can severely compromise the quality of evidence. However\
 , analysis of approximately 5500 studies from Conservation Evidence databa
 se also suggest that less robustly designed studies dominate the conservat
 ion and social science literature\, presumably due to practical and resour
 ce limitations. Surely a call for increased rigour? And yet practitioners 
 and policy-makers also prefer locally relevant evidence to inform their de
 cision-making. Further analysis of the Conservation Evidence database sugg
 ests relevant evidence (in terms of taxa\, biome\, location and metrics us
 ed – i.e. external validity) is also in short supply. This leads us to a
  major philosophical question that applies across disciplines – how\, wi
 th limited resources and imperfect evidence bases\, to balance efforts to 
 improve evidence bases between relevance and robustness (e.g. internal vs 
 external validity)? I will talk about the challenges we face in conservati
 on and many other disciplines in reconciling these competing interests and
  provide some possible solutions we are working on. These include some pro
 totype decision-making tools that allow the weighting of evidence by its r
 obustness and relevance\, as well as leading users through the process of 
 making an evidence-based decision\, whilst incorporating a multitude of ot
 her socioeconomic factors and qualitative sources of evidence.
LOCATION:Sir Arthur Marshall Room\, Engineering Design Centre\, CUED
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