Research Priorities from Animal Behaviour for Maximising Conservation Progress
Résumé
Poor communication between academic researchers and wildlife managers limits conservation progress and innovation. As a result, input from overlapping fields, such as animal behaviour, is underused in conservation management despite its demonstrated utility as a conservation tool and countless papers advocating its use. Communication and collaboration across these two disciplines are unlikely to improve without clearly identified management needs and demonstrable impacts of behavioural-based conservation management. To facilitate this process, a team of wildlife managers and animal behaviour researchers conducted a research prioritisation exercise, identifying 50 key questions that have great potential to resolve critical conservation and management problems. The resulting agenda highlights the diversity and extent of advances that both fields could achieve through collaboration. Who Should Be Involved in Conservation Research Decisions? The successful conservation of biodiversity requires collective decision-making among multiple stakeholders with diverse viewpoints, including scientific researchers and applied wildlife managers. While the ultimate goals of academics and wildlife managers can be similar, the means by which they tackle conservation problems differ. Academics often focus on mechanisms or overarching principles, while pursuing questions that attract grants and publications. By contrast , managers require detailed and feasible solutions for handling specific situations and need evidence for the cost and effectiveness of their proposed projects, while competing for resources devoted to other species or habitats in need (Box 1). Such different approaches lead to conflicting research priorities. Conservation science and management crucially need both of these complementary perspectives, but collaboration between them is often weak [1–3]. The following research agenda represents the outcome of a collaborative process between Trends Conservation progress relies on communication between researchers and managers. Ethologists and wildlife managers determined 50 conservation research priorities. The list shows tremendous breadth and potential for conservation gain. We identify routes for developing efficient and cost-effective interventions.