Developing collaborative research to improve effectiveness in biodiversity conservation practice

Conservation planning, which includes characterizing local biodiversity, identifying spatial priorities, as well as both designing and applying conservation measures, is a process that is difficult to achieve in practice (Margules & Pressey 2000). Over the last decade, a growing literature has highlighted that management guidelines and conservation assessments published by scientists are rarely translated into action by resource managers either because they do not address key needs or they fail to come to the attention of end-users (Latta 2000; Pullin & Knight 2004; Sarewitz & Pielke 2007; Sutherland et al. 2009; Hart & Calhoun 2010). For example, two-thirds of conservation assessments published in the peerreviewed literature do not deliver effectivemanagement actions (Knight et al. 2008). Thus, approaches to better convert scientific knowledge into conservation practice are needed to improve the effectiveness of conservation actions (Pickett et al. 1997; Sutherland et al. 2004; Pullin et al. 2004). With this goal in mind, we report a collaborative research initiative between scientists and managers which has been developed over 10 years to conserve native brown trout Salmo trutta threatened by genetic introgression arising from the large-scale introduction of non-native trout. The brown trout is an interesting model organism for conservation issues because it has a high level of ecological and genetic intraspecific biodiversity, which is threatened locally by human activities (environmental changes, overharvesting, stocking operations, invasion by non-native fish), and it is also of considerable socioeconomic value (Laikre et al. 1999). We describe the successful implementation of our collaboration which may serve as an example for similar approaches to stakeholder collaboration that connects scientific knowledge with conservation action. From our experience, we suggest a shift in applied ecological science towards the development of collaborative research that merges scientific methods and management planning developed through lasting and dynamic stakeholder collaboration.