A subject about which little is published but from which so much can be learned ! : Failure in conservation projects: Everyone experiences it, few record it
The problem is that conservation journals and conferences don't like to publish failure reports. This is a well known bias in science publishing, which is well known to do much harm in a longer scale. Lessons learned are often lost, and conservationists in other places repeat the same mistakes. Sometimes a wrong idea is tried again and again, because only positive outcomes are published. Sometimes a failed idea resurfaces after a decade or two, because the new generation of conservationists doesn't know it has failed. It is interesting to read language coming from business project management in conservation. This can help some conservation projects.
Agreed. Personally I think things will only improve in conservation once conservationists are more honest and open about failure and I think that actually we can even delve deeper and be more critical about a good many conservation journals and their emphasis on publishing success stories ( endeavours that are often are nuanced and have emerged from past failures themselves). This quote of Winston Churchill is strangely pertinent IMO : “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
@Onychrhynchus coronatus For somebody who claims to be a 'conservation scientist' you seem surprisingly unaware that 'publication bias' is present in all science. If conservationists want to diminish this, they could look to biomedical sciences for e.g. methods to discover whether results omit failures.
Didn't see this reply Jurek , to clarify , I don't remember having claimed on this forum to be a "conservation scientist" or an academic (I most definitely would not want to be involved in academe), I'm just a conservation practitioner. I find the label of "conservation science" (implying a precise science) to be more than a bit awkward and pretentious as conservation is necessarily interdisciplinary and now more than ever is social science based. Nor for that matter am I unaware that "publication bias" is present in all scientific fields, as you suggest. Quite the opposite actually. My significant other is a neurologist , so I am constantly being kept in the know by her (whether I want to hear about it or not) about the extent of publication bias in neurological research and general medicine. Moreover, yes, the field of conservation biology should look outside the ivory tower to other fields in order to improve things. My point was that the incidence of publication bias is a serious issue in conservation (as it is in most fields) and one that consequently needs to be addressed if conservation biology is to rise to the challenge of mitigating biodiversity loss at such a critical time.
