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There is still widespread debate about the role that an evaluator could, should or even must play. Evaluations are often complex and require a broad array of interlinked roles and areas of expertise, making it difficult to generate a singular definition of an evaluator. Furthermore, an evaluator may be expected to change their responsibilities and actions throughout the stages of an evaluation, changing the role they play. As practitioners, we believe there is value in contributing to this discussion, providing our perspectives based on personal experience and data collected during the 2022 European Evaluation Society conference. In this article we seek to describe six evaluator traits which we believe to be the most influential to the roles which we play, and six evaluator roles which best illustrate the impact of changing these traits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As more land is altered by human activity and more species become at risk of extinction, it is essential that we understand the requirements for conserving threatened species across human-modified landscapes. Owing to their rarity and often sparse distributions, threatened species can be difficult to study and efficient methods to sample them across wide temporal and spatial scales have been lacking. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is increasingly recognized as an efficient method for collecting data on vocal species; however, the development of automated species detectors required to analyse large amounts of acoustic data is not keeping pace. Here, we collected 35 805 h of acoustic data across 341 sites in a region over 1000 km 2 to show that PAM, together with a newly developed automated detector, is able to successfully detect the endangered Geoffroy's spider monkey ( Ateles geoffroyi ), allowing us to show that Geoffroy's spider monkey was absent below a threshold of 80% forest cover and within 1 km of primary paved roads and occurred equally in old growth and secondary forests. We discuss how this methodology circumvents many of the existing issues in traditional sampling methods and can be highly successful in the study of vocally rare or threatened species. Our results provide tools and knowledge for setting targets and developing conservation strategies for the protection of Geoffroy's spider monkey.