Software support for environmental evidence synthesis

Abstract

Ecological research is central to efforts to ensure the provision of critical societal needs such as clean water, carbon abatement, and to avert the loss of biodiversity. The amount of research published on these subjects has increased enormously in recent ears, yet this research is not always used to improve environmental management or policy4. This ‘research-implementation gap’ is sustained by many factors including low access to scientific research outside of academia, a lack of flexible decision-making structures to incorporate new information, and mismatches between management and scientific priorities. A key step towards bridging the research-implementation gap, however, is to gather insights from the entire body of available evidence to ensure that scientific advice is as consistent and accurate as possible. This requires evidence synthesis; work by individuals or teams that take scientific outputs (articles and reports) and use them to understand the effectiveness of an intervention in a range of contexts. Consequently, applied synthesis has become indispensable to the application of scientific information to socio-ecological problems.