Protected Areas: What does assessing management effectiveness say about management impacts?

What is it about?

Assessments of Protected Area Management Effectiveness (PAME) have been used for adaptive management and to track progress in thousands of protected areas (PAs) worldwide. We review PAME assessment and the evidence for a link between its results and the conservation impacts of PAs, and discuss the limitations and future use of PAME data in measuring the impact of PA management on conservation outcomes.

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Why is it important?

Understanding the impacts of management interventions is crucial to effective conservation, but data for assessing impacts are scarce. PAME assessments are an important potential source of relevant data, but the characteristics of the data present significant limitations for their application in rigorous scientific impact evaluations.