Journal articles, reports, and other documents contain evidence that can inform environmental management decisions, but few managers have the time to stay abreast of the scientific literature, let alone extract evidence from that literature for use in their decision-making.
EcoEvidEx—the Ecological Evidence Exchange—seeks to provide scientific evidence to environmental managers in a format and timeframe that meets their needs.
The way EcoEvidEx will work is:
The EcoEvidEx database is built to Ecological Evidence Standard that allows it to link seamlessly with existing evidence databases built to the standard, such as CADLink (US EPA) and Eco Evidence (eWater), which are in turn linked to decision support tools used by environmental managers.
We will be testing the EcoEvidEx entry process for the next few months.
We encourage researchers to use this test system to enter evidence from one or more of their previously published papers, either from Freshwater Science or another journal, into the form and then provide us with feedback on utility and usability.
Help files for entering evidence are available for those with questions about how to extract evidence from scientific papers or specific fields in the form.
By contributing to EcoEvidEx, authors will make their key findings more readily available to environmental managers and other researchers. This increases the likelihood that managers’ decisions and their everyday management tasks are informed by available, sound science.
Once EcoEvidEx is well established and linked to Freshwater Science and other journals, it will not only benefit environmental managers (and the environment) but also researchers, who should see higher citation rates for their papers and more uptake of their research into management decisions.
EcoEvidEx is being developed by an international team from government, university and private sectors with a shared interest in enabling evidence-based environmental management.