Abstract Conservation planning plays an instrumental role in facilitating progress towards biodiversity targets by providing practitioners with the tools required to allocate resources and implement actions. However, the utility of a burgeoning scientific literature to on-the-ground conservation has been questioned. Given such criticisms, and the lack of progress towards the global Aichi Biodiversity Targets, we aim to assess the contribution of scientific research to the field of conservation planning. We applied topic modelling to a body of literature consisting of 4471 articles pertaining to conservation planning published between 2000 and 2016. We quantified changes in topic popularity, and assessed the extent to which different topics were addressed within the same articles. We found that research into the status of species and habitats was most prevalent, the process of action planning received considerably less attention, and implementation attracted the least research of all. The scientific literature was thus dominated by biological rather than socio-political research, and furthermore showed a general lack of inter-disciplinary research, which is problematic given that ultimately it is the socio-political context that will determine the success of conservation efforts. The number of publications on implementation and monitoring declined over time, suggesting a waning interest in publishing evidence of plan effectiveness, and that limited efforts have been made to address the “implementation crisis”. We suggest that filling research gaps, through integration of the social sciences and placing greater value on evidence syntheses, would push scientific research towards greater applicability and help to provide the necessary information to achieve global biodiversity targets.

中文翻译：

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科学研究对保护规划的贡献

摘要 保护规划通过为从业者提供分配资源和实施行动所需的工具，在促进实现生物多样性目标方面发挥着重要作用。然而，新兴科学文献对实地保护的效用受到质疑。鉴于此类批评以及在实现全球爱知生物多样性目标方面缺乏进展，我们旨在评估科学研究对保护规划领域的贡献。我们将主题建模应用于由 2000 年至 2016 年间发表的 4471 篇与保护规划相关的文章组成的文献主体。我们量化了主题流行度的变化，并评估了同一文章中不同主题的讨论程度。我们发现，对物种和栖息地状况的研究最为普遍，行动计划的过程受到的关注要少得多，而实施所吸引的研究最少。因此，科学文献以生物学研究而非社会政治研究为主，此外还显示出普遍缺乏跨学科研究，这是有问题的，因为最终是社会政治背景将决定保护工作的成功。随着时间的推移，关于实施和监测的出版物数量下降，表明人们对发布计划有效性证据的兴趣减弱，而且为解决“实施危机”所做的努力有限。我们建议填补研究空白​​，