Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trusts are Conservation Evidence Champions!

In managing our 15 nature reserves around Sheffield and Rotherham, we have to make lots of decisions about how we manage them. Should we clear vegetation or plant trees? When should we cut our grasslands? How could we best protect endangered species?

It’s important when we make these decisions that we are making the most of the evidence available to us to ensure that we make decisions that will bring the biggest benefit for nature.

Signing up as a Conservation Evidence Champions means that we have committed to ensure that evidence is included in the decisions we make about how we manage our nature reserves. 

Who are Conservation Evidence?

Conservation Evidence (CE) is a free, authoritative information resource designed to support decisions about how to maintain and restore biodiversity. It summarises evidence from the scientific literature about the effects of conservation interventions, such as methods of habitat or species management. They also publish new evidence in their open access journal ‘Conservation Evidence’. CE aims to break down the barriers between published scientific evidence and practitioners, summarises scientific data for different conservation actions, score those actions for effectiveness, certainty and harms using experts, and maintain a database tool to assist decision making.

Conservation Evidence does a lot of fantastic searching for existing published research, and synthesising it into easy to digest summaries and makes it easier for us to incorporate this evidence into our conservation work.

Being Evidence Champions also gives us access to workshops and advice for our staff and provides regular networking and sharing opportunities across the Evidence Champions network.

You can learn more about conservation evidence here: https://www.conservationevidence.com/ 

Data and evidence: the dream team

Signing up to be a Conservation Evidence Champion complements our existing work on the More Data for Nature project where we’re carrying out long term monitoring on our nature reserves and beyond to track long term trends. Having this data means that we can test our management decisions and see how they affect our reserves. We can then feed this information back into the Conservation Evidence network and help others make better evidence-based decisions. 

https://www.wildsheffield.com/wildlife/wildlife-conservation/more-data-for-nature/ 

In good company

We join the ranks of a whole host of fantastic conservation organisations, including three from across the Wildlife Trusts network: Kent Wildlife Trust, Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust and the Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire.

Other organisations signed up as Conservation Evidence champions include:

• Woodland Trust
• Froglife
• Butterfly Conservation
• Amphibian and Reptile Conservation (ARC)

And you can meet the rest of the Conservation Evidence Champions here:

https://www.conservationevidence.com/content/page/112