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Abstract: Decision triggers show great potential for facilitating timely management action, promoting evidence‐based management and preventing undesirable changes to the status of species, ecosystems and threats. Integration of decision triggers into day‐to‐day management practice has been slow, constrained by insufficient resources and limited in‐house expertise. Arguably, the greatest impediment is the lack of an overarching process with robust and accessible methods for developing and implementing decision triggers in a manner that fits within an organization's established processes and skill sets. We identify the steps necessary for setting decision triggers and highlight how these steps align with commonly used conservation planning and management frameworks, for ease of adoption. We emphasize that decision triggers do not require a known ecological threshold, and can be applied to data‐rich and data‐poor contexts, with single or multiple management objectives. Synthesis and applications. This work highlights the necessary steps involved, and importantly, the suite of methods that can be used to set decision triggers, with the aim of supporting practitioners in the development of robust and defensible decision triggers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protected area management effectiveness (PAME) evaluation is increasingly undertaken to evaluate governance, assess conservation outcomes and inform evidence-based management of protected areas (PAs). Within PAME, quantitative approaches to assess biodiversity outcomes are now emerging, where biological monitoring data are directly assessed against quantitative (numerically defined) condition categories (termed quantitative condition assessments). However, more commonly qualitative condition assessments are employed in PAME, which use descriptive condition categories and are evaluated largely with expert judgement that can be subject to a range of biases, such as linguistic uncertainty and overconfidence. Despite the benefits of increased transparency and repeatability of evaluations, quantitative condition assessments are rarely used in PAME. To understand why, we interviewed practitioners from all Australian marine protected area (MPA) networks, which have access to long-term biological monitoring data and are developing or conducting PAME evaluations. Our research revealed that there is a desire within management agencies to implement quantitative condition assessment of biodiversity outcomes in Australian MPAs. However, practitioners report many challenges in transitioning from undertaking qualitative to quantitative condition assessments of biodiversity outcomes, which are hampering progress. Challenges include a lack of agency capacity (staff numbers and money), knowledge gaps, and diminishing public and political support for PAs. We point to opportunities to target strategies that will assist agencies overcome these challenges, including new decision support tools, approaches to better finance conservation efforts, and to promote more management relevant science. While a single solution is unlikely to achieve full evidence-based conservation, we suggest ways for agencies to target strategies and advance PAME evaluations toward best practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the concept of the evidence-based management approach as an effective guide in managing natural systems by integrating the best available evidence to support decisions. Overview of the development of the concept and its increased attention from conservation scientists to assist them in the protection of biodiversity is provided. Suggestion on the need for conservation practitioners and scientists to collaborate to effectively implement the approach is emphasized.