Obstacles to gathering conservation evidence from the monitoring of nature reserves: A spatial solution?

This paper identifies a range of obstacles to gathering evidence from the monitoring of nature reserves that can subsequently be used to evaluate and guide future management. The key obstacles are: (1) monitoring is difficult to fund, (2) many conservation NGOs do not have a tradition of being science-led organisations, (3) dominance of descriptive and rapid assessment approaches to reserve monitoring, (4) lack of analytical capacity, and (5) linking data to outputs and outcomes. A spatial grid-mapping solution is proposed and described in a case study of heathland restoration.