The medium over the message: Differential knowledge of conservation outreach activities and implications for threatened species.

Conservation outreach is regularly conducted to increase support for conservation by altering local awareness and attitudes about species or environmental issues. However, there is often little assessment of the effectiveness of these activities. We investigated knowledge of past conservation outreach in 26 villages adjacent to Bawangling National Nature Reserve, Hainan, China, which contains the last population of the Hainan gibbon (Nomascus hainanus). The medium of past outreach activities was reported most frequently by interviewees, followed by who delivered them and the outreach topic, with the fewest interviewees reporting the specific messages being communicated (the consequences of following conservation management policies). Negatively-framed messages, emphasizing prohibited activities and associated punishments, were reported more than positively-framed messages that aimed to foster conservation support. Male interviewees and those with higher education levels reported more aspects of past activities. The Hainan gibbon had higher salience than other threatened native species, and reporting the occurrence (but not necessarily the content) of past outreach was associated with increased likelihood of knowing that gibbons were threatened. These findings highlight the need for conservation outreach to increase both exposure and retention of key messages among target audiences. Meaningful and concrete conservation benefits should be communicated to local communities, and the effectiveness of outreach using a flagship species could be expanded to also improve awareness of other conservation-priority species within the same landscape.

Corrigendum: A Severe Lack of Evidence Limits Effective Conservation of the World's Primates.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biaa082.].

A Severe Lack of Evidence Limits Effective Conservation of the World's Primates.

Threats to biodiversity are well documented. However, to effectively conserve species and their habitats, we need to know which conservation interventions do (or do not) work. Evidence-based conservation evaluates interventions within a scientific framework. The Conservation Evidence project has summarized thousands of studies testing conservation interventions and compiled these as synopses for various habitats and taxa. In the present article, we analyzed the interventions assessed in the primate synopsis and compared these with other taxa. We found that despite intensive efforts to study primates and the extensive threats they face, less than 1% of primate studies evaluated conservation effectiveness. The studies often lacked quantitative data, failed to undertake postimplementation monitoring of populations or individuals, or implemented several interventions at once. Furthermore, the studies were biased toward specific taxa, geographic regions, and interventions. We describe barriers for testing primate conservation interventions and propose actions to improve the conservation evidence base to protect this endangered and globally important taxon.

Imminent extinction in the wild of the world's largest amphibian.

Species with large geographic ranges are considered resilient to global decline [1]. However, human pressures on biodiversity affect increasingly large areas, in particular across Asia, where market forces drive overexploitation of species [2]. Range-wide threat assessments are often costly and thus extrapolated from non-representative local studies [3]. The Chinese giant salamander (Andrias davidianus), the world's largest amphibian, is thought to occur across much of China, but populations are harvested for farming as luxury food [4]. Between 2013 and 2016, we conducted field surveys and 2,872 interviews in possibly the largest wildlife survey conducted in China. This extensive effort revealed that populations of this once-widespread species are now critically depleted or extirpated across all surveyed areas of their range, and illegal poaching is widespread.

Analysis of the Capacity of Google Trends to Measure Interest in Conservation Topics and the Role of Online News.

With the continuous growth of internet usage, Google Trends has emerged as a source of information to investigate how social trends evolve over time. Knowing how the level of interest in conservation topics--approximated using Google search volume--varies over time can help support targeted conservation science communication. However, the evolution of search volume over time and the mechanisms that drive peaks in searches are poorly understood. We conducted time series analyses on Google search data from 2004 to 2013 to investigate: (i) whether interests in selected conservation topics have declined and (ii) the effect of news reporting and academic publishing on search volume. Although trends were sensitive to the term used as benchmark, we did not find that public interest towards conservation topics such as climate change, ecosystem services, deforestation, orangutan, invasive species and habitat loss was declining. We found, however, a robust downward trend for endangered species and an upward trend for ecosystem services. The quantity of news articles was related to patterns in Google search volume, whereas the number of research articles was not a good predictor but lagged behind Google search volume, indicating the role of news in the transfer of conservation science to the public.