Volume 39
Issue 3
- The Future Needs Us All
- Apply for a BCI Student Research Scholarship
- Evidence Champion
- Virtual Bat Week
- North American Society for Bat Research Turns 50
- Fish-eating Myotis
- Saving Malaysia’s Fruit Bats
- Fascinating facts about Malaysia’s fruit-eating bats
- Out of the Darkness
- Which Came First: Echolocation or Fruit Bats?
- Backyard “Bativists”
- Ears in the Field
- Gene Genius
BCI recognized for its commitment to use and contribute evidence in its conservation practice
Conservation Evidence, a conservation organization affiliated with the University of Cambridge, has named BCI as an Evidence Champion to recognize BCI’s commitment to practicing evidence-based conservation.
The UK-based organization compiles and maintains an online database allowing people to look up conservation actions and learn about whether or not evidence backs certain practices. The Conservation Evidence online database collates and provides summaries of relevant scientific literature that demonstrate what conservation actions are based on evidence for different species groups or management categories. The program also publishes the online journal “Conservation Evidence” and provides annual updated synopses of evidence, including for bat conservation. Individual actions are summarized and scored by the available evidence in the scientific literature. For example, under bat conservation, “creating artificial water sources” is deemed “likely to be beneficial,” citing evidence from five studies that tested the efficacy of the approach.
BCI recently signed an agreement with Conservation Evidence to use evidence in our project planning; test and publish results of our conservation interventions; and ask BCI student scholarship recipients to use the conservation evidence database when planning research.
“BCI’s collaboration with Conservation Evidence is part of our commitment to ensuring that our work contributes to global efforts to improve conservation practices for bats,” says BCI Chief Scientist Dr. Winifred Frick, who is on the Scientific Advisory Board for Conservation Evidence’s Bat Conservation Synopsis.