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| Protected areas (PAs) are at the forefront of conservation efforts, and yet despite
considerable progress towards the global target of having 17% of the world’s
land area within protected areas by 2020, biodiversity continues to decline.
The discrepancy between increasing PA coverage and negative biodiversity
trends has resulted in renewed efforts to enhance PA effectiveness. The global
conservation community has conducted thousands of assessments of protected
area management effectiveness (PAME), and interest in the use of these data to
helpmeasure the conservation impact of PAmanagement interventions is high.
Here, we summarize the status of PAME assessment, review the published evidence
for a link between PAMEassessment results and the conservation impacts
of PAs, and discuss the limitations and future use of PAME data in measuring
the impact of PAmanagement interventions on conservation outcomes.We conclude
that PAME data,while designed as a tool for local adaptivemanagement,
may also help to provide insights into the impact of PA management interventions
from the local-to-global scale. However, the subjective and ordinal
characteristics of the data present significant limitations for their application
in rigorous scientific impact evaluations, a problem that should be recognized
and mitigated where possible. | |
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