10 years of decision-making for biodiversity conservation actions: A systematic literature review

Data and code to produce figures in manuscript submitted to Conservation Biology:data_decision_examples_with_years.csv: data for all main figuresauthors.csv: cleaned list of authors to produce network figures in supplementary materialinterrater_data_lit_review.csv: data to produce figure on inter-rater-reliability in supplementary materialchapter1_clean_plots....R: code to wrangle data and produce all figuresShort summary of project:Decision-science highlights criteria that enable robust planning and which, if utilized during planning of conservation actions, can increase chances to achieve conservation aims. Five such criteria are 1) a quantifiable objective, 2) a clear assumption about the impact of available actions, 3) consideration of constraints, 4) exploring uncertainty, and 5) deliberation on trade-offs. This review quantified the extent to which these five criteria were utilized in published examples of conservation planning in academic and applied context. Less than 50% of identified examples included all five criteria, with differences between five frequently used decision-aiding frameworks: Adaptive Management, Systematic Conservation Planning, Structured Decision Making, Multi-Criteria-Decision-Analysis and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis. Examples using Structured Decision Making were limited in numbers but had more than 50% uptake of all criteria from the field of decision science. Although Systematic Conservation Planning and Adaptive Management provided the vast majority of examples, they appear to be more prevalent in academic contexts than in real-world management plans, and examples using Adaptive Management had only 7% uptake of all criteria. While academic examples of best practice planning that include all five important criteria exist for many countries around the world, best practice examples of real-world planning were almost exclusively located in the United States and Australia.All data and code used in this project are available here.