1,720,962 research outputs found
An evaluation of the effectiveness of area-based conservation interventions in avoiding biodiversity loss in South Africa
Get PDFCounterfactual impact evaluation studies form an important evidence base for the effectiveness of conservation projects, programs, and policies (collectively referred to as conservation interventions). In South Africa, counterfactual impact evaluation methods have rarely been applied to local conservation interventions, and therefore evidence for the effectiveness of key strategic national conservation approaches is lacking. This study evaluated three area-based interventions that together aim to avoid the loss of areas most important for the persistence of biodiversity in the terrestrial realm as evidence towards the effectiveness of South Africa’s landscape approach to biodiversity conservation. The first intervention, South Africa’s National Protected Area Expansion Strategy (NPAES), set ambitious targets to double the extent of South Africa’s protected area network while ensuring that the expansion preferentially occurs in areas of under-represented biodiversity. The strategy was evaluated in terms of its effectiveness in guiding protected area expansion towards more equitable representation of South Africa’s biodiversity through an assessment of changes in indicators of protected area expansion decision-making before and after the implementation of the strategy. The second intervention is the use of maps of biodiversity priorities to guide land use change decisions outside protected areas. Impact was evaluated as avoided loss of Critical Biodiversity Areas (CBAs), which need to remain in a natural condition to meet in situ conservation targets for species, ecosystems, and ecological processes. Avoided loss in CBAs was benchmarked against avoided loss in protected areas, to contextualize the effectiveness of land use planning as a conservation intervention. Lastly, the effectiveness of stricter land use regulations for threatened ecosystems to reduce land conversion pressure on these ecosystems was evaluated. Key findings were that protected areas are highly effective conservation interventions where they can be implemented, but their capacity for conservation impact is limited by severe constraints on strategic expansion.Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Science, School of Environmental Sciences, 202
An evaluation of the effectiveness of area-based conservation interventions in avoiding biodiversity loss in South Africa
Get PDFCounterfactual impact evaluation studies form an important evidence base for the effectiveness of conservation projects, programs, and policies (collectively referred to as conservation interventions). In South Africa, counterfactual impact evaluation methods have rarely been applied to local conservation interventions, and therefore evidence for the effectiveness of key strategic national conservation approaches is lacking. This study evaluated three area-based interventions that together aim to avoid the loss of areas most important for the persistence of biodiversity in the terrestrial realm as evidence towards the effectiveness of South Africa’s landscape approach to biodiversity conservation. The first intervention, South Africa’s National Protected Area Expansion Strategy (NPAES), set ambitious targets to double the extent of South Africa’s protected area network while ensuring that the expansion preferentially occurs in areas of under-represented biodiversity. The strategy was evaluated in terms of its effectiveness in guiding protected area expansion towards more equitable representation of South Africa’s biodiversity through an assessment of changes in indicators of protected area expansion decision-making before and after the implementation of the strategy. The second intervention is the use of maps of biodiversity priorities to guide land use change decisions outside protected areas. Impact was evaluated as avoided loss of Critical Biodiversity Areas (CBAs), which need to remain in a natural condition to meet in situ conservation targets for species, ecosystems, and ecological processes. Avoided loss in CBAs was benchmarked against avoided loss in protected areas, to contextualize the effectiveness of land use planning as a conservation intervention. Lastly, the effectiveness of stricter land use regulations for threatened ecosystems to reduce land conversion pressure on these ecosystems was evaluated. Key findings were that protected areas are highly effective conservation interventions where they can be implemented, but their capacity for conservation impact is limited by severe constraints on strategic expansion.Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Science, School of Environmental Sciences, 202
The South African Living Planet Index shows the value of a supposedly ‘uninformative’ indicator.
No full textMonitoring the local abundance of wild species is a priority for policy and management. The Living Planet Index (LPI) tracks global trends in the relative abundance of monitored wild vertebrates. However, barring a few exceptions, the LPI's uptake at the national level has been limited. Prominent critiques have not helped the perception that the LPI and its underlying database are inadequate for national application. After developing a national LPI for South Africa, we assert that the process of developing the index is valuable and information-rich, even if the resulting indicator itself is likely of limited accuracy. Specifically, we first calculated three versions of the LPI by applying different weightings to account for taxonomic biases. This demonstrated how incomplete and biased data clouded our ability to determine abundance trends accurately. Next, we recalculated the LPI after supplementing the global database with high-quality information from a long-term aerial census of mammal herbivores. Adding these high-quality time-series had little effect on the LPI, suggesting that the index is less sensitive to the quality of time-series for well-studied taxa than to additional information from poorly studied taxonomic groups. The uncertainties around the South African LPI preclude any confident statements about the average trends in abundance, yet they shine a bright spotlight on knowledge gaps that should be the focus of prioritized monitoring. Therefore, we advocate for other countries to develop their own national LPIs, which are valuable indicators of the state of knowledge (or ignorance) on the abundance of wild species.JRC.D.6 - Nature Conservation and Observation
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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