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State-controlled protected areas (PAs) have dominated conservation strategies globally, yet their performance relative to other governance regimes is rarely assessed comprehensively. Furthermore, performance indicators of forest PAs are typically restricted to deforestation, although the extent of forest degradation is greater. We address these shortfalls through an empirical impact evaluation of state PAs, Indigenous Territories (ITs), and civil society and private Conservation Concessions (CCs) on deforestation and degradation throughout the Peruvian Amazon. We integrated remote-sensing data with environmental and socio-economic datasets, and used propensity-score matching to assess: (i) how deforestation and degradation varied across governance regimes between 2006–2011; (ii) their proximate drivers; and (iii) whether state PAs, CCs and ITs avoided deforestation and degradation compared with logging and mining concessions, and the unprotected landscape. CCs, state PAs, and ITs all avoided deforestation and degradation compared to analogous areas in the unprotected landscape. CCs and ITs were on average more effective in this respect than state PAs, showing that local governance can be equally or more effective than centralized state regimes. However, there were no consistent differences between conservation governance regimes when matched to logging and mining concessions. Future impact assessments would therefore benefit from further disentangling governance regimes across unprotected land.

Increasing the coverage of effectively managed protected areas (PAs) is a key focus of the 2020 Aichi biodiversity targets. PA management has received considerable attention, often based on the widely held, but rarely examined, assumption that positive conservation outcomes will result from increased PA management inputs. To shed light on this assumption, we integrated data on PA management factors with 2006–2011 avoided forest degradation and deforestation across the Peruvian Amazon, using a counterfactual approach, combined with interviews and ranking exercises. We show that while increasing PA management input to Amazonian PAs tended to reduce likelihoods of forest degradation and deforestation, the associations were weak. Key challenges facing PAs ranked by PA managers included wider law enforcement, corruption and land title issues, rather than local management factors. We therefore encourage the post‐2020 conservation targets to adopt holistic approaches beyond PA management, incorporating political, institutional and governance contexts across scales.

Addressing today’s environmental challenges is intimately linked to understanding and improving natural resource governance institutions. As a result conservation initiatives are increasingly realizing the importance of integrating local perspectives of land tenure arrangements, natural resource rights, and local beliefs into conservation approaches. However, current work has not sufficiently considered the dynamic nature of natural resource governance institutions over time and the potential implications for current conservation interventions. We therefore explored how and why hunting governance has changed since the precolonial period in two ethnic hunting communities in Gabon, Central Africa, integrating various ethnographic methods with resource-use mapping, and a historic literature review. In both communities, hunting governance has undergone significant changes since the precolonial period. A closed-access, lineage-based system of resource use with strict penalties for trespassing, has evolved into a more open-access system, in which the influence of customary governance systems, including magico-political aspects, has declined. These changes have occurred mainly in response to policies and governance structures put in place by the colonial government and postindependence, early state laws. This included a policy of merging villages, the introduction of more modern hunting techniques such as guns and wire cables, and a shift from community to government ownership of the land. Current governance structures are thus the product of a complex mixture of customary, colonial and state influences. These findings suggest that a historical perspective of resource governance, gained through in-depth and long-term engagement with local communities, can provide important insights for community-based conservation approaches, such as helping to identify potential causes and perceptions of environmental change and to design more suitable conservation initiatives with local people.

Background Establishing protected areas is a key approach to protecting nature. However, protected areas are often biased towards remote and less productive lands. It is important to evaluate the impacts protected areas have had, or in other words, what changes in outcomes of interest are attributable to protected areas. Studies that evaluate the impact of protected areas on vegetation—the state and processes that support biodiversity—are scarce and published in a range of disciplines. This systematic review will scope, identify, and synthesize studies that quantitatively measure the impact of protected areas on vegetation extent and condition. The findings will be useful for researchers and policy makers and provide important knowledge for setting post 2020 targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity. This review will also identify research gaps in the current evidence base and provide direction for future research. Methods This review follows the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence guidelines for evidence synthesis and complies with the ROSES (RepOrting standards for Systematic Evidence Synthesis) reporting framework. We will use a comprehensive search strategy developed through several rounds of scoping review to cover databases; Web of Science, Scopus and CAB Abstracts, 16 organizational websites, google scholar and existing review documents. Our search terms and strategies aim to find impact evaluation studies (both peer-reviewed and grey literature) in English from protected areas globally. The search results will be screened at title, abstract, and then full text by two independent reviewers. A quality appraisal of evidence will be conducted using Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) risk of bias tool. Review results will be presented in the form of narrative synthesis, as well as in meta-analysis form, where data quality and amount allow.

Unsustainable exploitation of wild animals is one of the greatest threats to biodiversity and to millions of people depending on wild meat for food and income. The international conservation and development community has committed to implementing plans for sustainable use of natural resources and has requested development of monitoring systems of bushmeat offtake and trade. Although offtake monitoring systems and indicators for marine species are more developed, information on harvesting terrestrial species is limited. Building on approaches developed to monitor exploitation of fisheries and population trends, we have proposed two novel indicators for harvested terrestrial species: the mean body mass indicator (MBMI) assessing whether hunters are relying increasingly on smaller species over time, as a measure of defaunation, by tracking body mass composition of harvested species within samples across various sites and dates; and the offtake pressure indicator (OPI) as a measure of harvesting pressure on groups of wild animals within a region by combining multiple time series of the number of harvested individuals across species. We applied these two indicators to recently compiled data for West and Central African mammals and birds. Our exploratory analyses show that the MBMI of harvested mammals decreased but that of birds rose between 1966/1975 and 2010. For both mammals and birds the OPI increased substantially during the observed time period. Given our results, time-series data and information collated from multiple sources are useful to investigate trends in body mass of hunted species and offtake volumes. In the absence of comprehensive monitoring systems, we suggest that the two indicators developed in our study are adequate proxies of wildlife offtake, which together with additional data can inform conservation policies and actions at regional and global scales.

The awareness of the need for robust impact evaluations in conservation is growing and statistical matching techniques are increasingly being used to assess the impacts of conservation interventions. Used appropriately matching approaches are powerful tools, but they also pose potential pitfalls. We outlined important considerations and best practice when using matching in conservation science. We identified 3 steps in a matching analysis. First, develop a clear theory of change to inform selection of treatment and controls and that accounts for real-world complexities and potential spillover effects. Second, select the appropriate covariates and matching approach. Third, assess the quality of the matching by carrying out a series of checks. The second and third steps can be repeated and should be finalized before outcomes are explored. Future conservation impact evaluations could be improved by increased planning of evaluations alongside the intervention, better integration of qualitative methods, considering spillover effects at larger spatial scales, and more publication of preanalysis plans. Implementing these improvements will require more serious engagement of conservation scientists, practitioners, and funders to mainstream robust impact evaluations into conservation. We hope this article will improve the quality of evaluations and help direct future research to continue to improve the approaches on offer. Hay más conciencia sobre la necesidad de evaluaciones de impacto más rigurosas y las técnicas de emparejamiento estadístico se están usan con más frecuencia para evaluar los impactos de intervenciones de conservación. Las técnicas de emparejamiento pueden ser herramientas poderosas si son utilizadas correctamente, pero también pueden llevar a conclusiones erróneas. En este artículo describimos consideraciones importantes para realizar estudios de conservación que utilizan técnicas de emparejamiento estadístico. Identificamos tres pasos dentro de un análisis de emparejamiento. Primero, es importante desarrollar una teoría del cambio que considere las complejidades del mundo real y las posibles consecuencias indirectas para poder seleccionar unidades de tratamiento y controles. Segundo, es clave seleccionar las covarianzas y la estrategia de emparejamiento apropiadas. Tercero, evaluar la calidad del emparejamiento a través de una serie de revisiones. El segundo y el tercer paso pueden ser repetidos y deben concluirse antes de que se exploren los resultados. Evaluaciones de impacto de intervenciones de conservación podrían mejorarse con una mejor planeación de las evaluaciones junto con la intervención, una mejor integración de los métodos cualitativos, mejor consideración de consecuencias indirectas a grandes escalas espaciales y un incremento en la publicación de planes pre-analíticos. La implementación de estas mejoras requerirá de un compromiso más serio por parte de científicos de la conservación, y de practicantes y financiadores. Esperamos que esteartículo mejore la calidad de evaluaciones y ayude a guiar futuras investigaciones e intervenciones de conservación. 目前，已经有越来越多的人认识到需要对保护的效果进行稳健的评估, 在评估保护措施的影响时也越来越 多地应用了统计匹配方法。 匹配方法若使用得当可成为有力工具，但也可能带来潜在陷阱。 本研究概述了在保 护科学中使用匹配方法时的重要注意事项和最佳实践。 我们确定了匹配分析的三个步骤。 首先是提出清晰的变 化理论来指导实验组和控制组的选择，其中要考虑到现实世界的复杂性和潜在的溢出效应。 接下来, 应选择合 适的协变量和匹配方法。 最后，需通过一系列的检查来评估匹配的质量。 第二步和第三步可以重复进行，但要 在输出匹配结果前完全确定。 在实施保护措施的同时加强评估规划、 更好地整合总结定性方法、 考虑更大空间 尺度的溢出效应，以及更多地公开发表预分析计划，将有助于改善未来的保护效果评估体系。 实施以上改进措 施还需要保护科学家、实践者和资助者的认真参与, 推动保护效果的稳健评估纳人保护工作的主流。 我们希望 本文有助于提升保护效果评估的质量，并帮助指导今后的研究以进一步改进现有的方法。

Overexploitation is one of the main pressures driving wildlife closer to extinction, yet broad‐scale data to evaluate species’ declines are limited. Using African pangolins (Family: Pholidota) as a case study, we demonstrate that collating local‐scale data can provide crucial information on regional trends in exploitation of threatened species to inform conservation actions and policy. We estimate that 0.4‐2.7 million pangolins are hunted annually in Central African forests. The number of pangolins hunted has increased by ∼150% and the proportion of pangolins of all vertebrates hunted increased from 0.04% to 1.83% over the past four decades. However, there were no trends in pangolins observed at markets, suggesting use of alternative supply chains. The price of giant (Smutsia gigantea) and arboreal (Phataginus sp.) pangolins in urban markets has increased 5.8 and 2.3 times respectively, mirroring trends in Asian pangolins. Efforts and resources are needed to increase law enforcement and population monitoring, and investigate linkages between subsistence hunting and illegal wildlife trade.

Historical as well as current species distribution data are needed to track changes in biodiversity. Species distribution data are found in a variety of sources, each of which has its own distinct bias toward certain taxa, time periods or places. We present GalliForm, a database that comprises 186687 galliform occurrence records linked to 118907 localities in Europe and Asia. Records were derived from museums, peer-reviewed and grey literature, unpublished field notes, diaries and correspondence, banding records, atlas records and online birding trip reports. We describe data collection processes, georeferencing methods and quality-control procedures. This database has underpinned several peer-reviewed studies, investigating spatial and temporal bias in biodiversity data, species’ geographic range changes and local extirpation patterns. In our rapidly changing world, an understanding of long-term change in species’ distributions is key to predicting future impacts of threatening processes such as land use change, over-exploitation of species and climate change. This database, its historical aspect in particular, provides a valuable source of information for further studies in macroecology and biodiversity conservation. Measurement(s) geographic location • Species • Occupancy Technology Type(s) georeferencing • digital curation Sample Characteristic - Organism Galliformes sp. Sample Characteristic - Location Palearctic Region • Indomalayan Region Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12886931

Addressing today’s environmental challenges is intimately linked to understanding and improving natural resource governance institutions. As a result conservation initiatives are increasingly realizing the importance of integrating local perspectives of land tenure arrangements, natural resource rights, and local beliefs into conservation approaches. However, current work has not sufficiently considered the dynamic nature of natural resource governance institutions over time and the potential implications for current conservation interventions. We therefore explored how and why hunting governance has changed since the precolonial period in two ethnic hunting communities in Gabon, Central Africa, integrating various ethnographic methods with resource-use mapping, and a historic literature review. In both communities, hunting governance has undergone significant changes since the precolonial period. A closed-access, lineage-based system of resource use with strict penalties for trespassing, has evolved into a more open-access system, in which the influence of customary governance systems, including magico-political aspects, has declined. These changes have occurred mainly in response to policies and governance structures put in place by the colonial government and postindependence, early state laws. This included a policy of merging villages, the introduction of more modern hunting techniques such as guns and wire cables, and a shift from community to government ownership of the land. Current governance structures are thus the product of a complex mixture of customary, colonial and state influences. These findings suggest that a historical perspective of resource governance, gained through in-depth and long-term engagement with local communities, can provide important insights for community-based conservation approaches, such as helping to identify potential causes and perceptions of environmental change and to design more suitable conservation initiatives with local people.