Box 1. Taking quackery out of conservation

Michael Wright knows he isn't being told the whole truth. The director of conservation and sustainable development for the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, Wright says he "falls out of his chair" if any of his grantees admit that their plans have misfired. "You get a proposal that says, 'Here are the things we want to do in the next three years', and then you get a report that says everything went according to plan," he says.

The true picture cannot be quite so rosy, Wright argues. But, in a field dominated by a few large organizations that rely on goodwill from foundations and the public to keep the money flowing, few conservationists are brave enough to admit to failure. "As much as fear of donors, it's institutional egos between organizations," says Wright.

In the past few years, efforts have been launched to make evaluation more rigorous and transparent. The three-year-old Conservation Measures Partnership, for instance, draws together big players in the field to create a common framework for deciding whether a project has succeeded. One goal is to harmonize terminology: for example, what Conservation International calls 'pressures' on a habitat or species, the WWF calls 'threats'.

But measuring the effectiveness of a particular project is only the start — the data must be disseminated to be useful. One attempt to do this is the website ConservationEvidence.com, run by William Sutherland of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. The site accepts various accounts of how interventions have gone, from journal articles to reports from wildlife managers. Several accounts of an issue are reviewed by an expert and encapsulated in an easy-to-read summary.

"I became increasingly uneasy about the fact that conservationists just make pronouncements about what is 'the right way'," explains Sutherland. He surveyed the people in eastern England who do the real work of conservation, such as park managers, and found that they get only 2.4% of their information from primary scientific literature⁹. His idea, he says, is to emulate the evidence-based medicine revolution launched in the 1970s, in which doctors began switching from tradition and intuition — and sometimes ineffective quackery — to remedies that had been shown to work by scientific review.

The Centre for Evidence-Based Conservation at the University of Birmingham, UK, has similar goals. Since its launch in 2003, the centre has put out reviews on such topics as whether controlled burning of upland heaths helps to maintain floral diversity. "Conservation has stood still," complains Andrew Pullin, who heads the centre. "We're still making the same mistakes. Until we can get critical appraisal of our own actions, and make it available, we are not going to advance."

Nevertheless, both he and Sutherland are optimistic that their approach will eventually prevail. "I think we will cause a shift in the way conservation is done," Pullin predicts.

Emma Marris