Protected areas are essential for preserving forest ecosystems and maintaining their ecological integrity. Nonetheless, their role in conserving understory plant species in Italy remains understudied. We analysed 5,423 vegetation plots sampled in Italian broadleaved deciduous forests between 1980 and 2020. Using propensity score matching, we controlled for potential confounding factors such as elevation, climate, proximity to...

Protected areas (PAs) are vital for biodiversity conservation and have expanded globally. However, increasing pressures on biodiversity make it difficult to achieve conservation goals. Using threat probability maps based on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List and the World Database of Protected Areas, we analyzed the relationship between PA coverage and the major threats to amphibians, birds, mammals, a...

Monitoring the governance and management effectiveness of area‐based conservation has long been recognized as an important foundation for achieving national and global biodiversity goals and enabling adaptive management. However, there are still many barriers that prevent conservation actors, including those affected by governance and management systems from implementing conservation activities and programs and from gathering...

The awareness of the need for robust impact evaluations in conservation is growing and statistical matching techniques are increasingly being used to assess the impacts of conservation interventions. Used appropriately matching approaches are powerful tools, but they also pose potential pitfalls. We outlined important considerations and best practice when using matching in conservation science. We identified 3 steps in a match...

Eight conventions make up the biodiversity cluster of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) that provide the critical international legal framework for the conservation and sustainable use of nature. However, concerns about the rate of implementation of the conventions at the national level have triggered discussions about the effectiveness of these MEAs in halting the loss of biodiversity. Two main concerns have emerge...

Conservation operates within complex systems with incomplete knowledge of the system and the interventions utilized. This frequently results in the inability to find generally applicable methods to alleviate threats to Earth's vanishing wildlife. One approach used in medicine and the social sciences has been to develop a deeper understanding of positive outliers. Where such outliers share similar characteristics, they may be c...

It is widely accepted that the main driver of the observed decline in biological diversity is increasing human pressure on Earth's ecosystems. However, the spatial patterns of change in human pressure and their relation to conservation efforts are less well known. We developed a spatially and temporally explicit map of global change in human pressure over 2 decades between 1990 and 2010 at a resolution of 10 km 2 . We evaluate...