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1. Introduction
1.1 Problem statement
There can be little doubt that the status of biodiversity is declining rapidly worldwide (Bini et
al, 2005), as reported by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA, 2005) and WWF
Living Planet Report (WWF, 2006). This has led to increased conservation
efforts and the
development of Multilateral Environmental Agreements such as the Convention on Biological
Diversity (CBD) and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES),
which in turn leads to formulation and implementation of management
strategies from the
government level to that of field based conservation managers (Pullin et al, 2004).
There is a subsequent need for conservation action to be informed by high quality science. The
loose targets of the CBD, for example, have led to the creation of many national action plans,
but are they suitably informed? This is not just a view held in the field of conservation, but for
wider environmental issues such as climate change. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) call for the use of the ‘best available science’ in their assessments (IPCC,
2001); a phrase explicitly coined in the US Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 (Tear et
al, 2005) and one that has been subsequently been defined
in legal terms in the US as
involving the use of research subject to ‘peer review and publication’, widely accepted in the
scientific community (Tear et al, 2005). Based on this assertion, the research that is published
in peer reviewed conservation journals should be forming the basis of conservation action, but
the degree to which it does this is largely unknown.
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