Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has emerged as a transformative tool for applied ecology, conservation and biodiversity monitoring, but its potential contribution to fundamental ecology is less often discussed, and fundamental PAM studies tend to be descriptive, rather than mechanistic. Here, we chart the most promising directions for ecologists wishing to use the suite of currently available acoustic methods to address long‐standing fundamental questions in ecology and explore new avenues of research. In both terrestrial and aquatic habitats, PAM provides an opportunity to ask questions across multiple spatial scales and at fine temporal resolution, and to capture phenomena or species that are difficult to observe. In combination with traditional approaches to data collection, PAM could release ecologists from myriad limitations that have, at times, precluded mechanistic understanding. We discuss several case studies to demonstrate the potential contribution of PAM to biodiversity estimation, population trend analysis, assessing climate change impacts on phenology and distribution, and understanding disturbance and recovery dynamics. We also highlight what is on the horizon for PAM, in terms of near‐future technological and methodological developments that have the potential to provide advances in coming years. Overall, we illustrate how ecologists can harness the power of PAM to address fundamental ecological questions in an era of ecology no longer characterised by data limitation. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

There is growing interest in evidence‐based conservation, yet there are no widely accepted standard definitions of evidence, let alone guidance on how to use it in the context of conservation and natural resource management practice. In this paper, we first draw on insights of evidence‐based practice from different disciplines to define evidence as being the “relevant information used to assess one or more hypotheses related to a question of interest.” We then construct a typology of different kinds of information, hypotheses, and evidence and show how these different types can be used in different steps of conservation practice. In particular, we distinguish between specific evidence used to assess project hypotheses and generic evidence used to assess generic hypotheses. We next build on this typology to develop a decision tree to support practitioners in how to appropriately use available specific and generic evidence in a given conservation situation. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of how to better promote and enable evidence‐based conservation in both projects and across the discipline of conservation. Our hope is that by understanding and using evidence better, conservation can both become more effective and attract increased support from society.

Tropical forests are crucial in terms of biodiversity and ecosystem services, but at the same time, they are major sources of revenue and provide livelihoods for forest‐dependent people. Hopes for the simultaneous achievement of conservation goals and poverty alleviation are therefore increasingly placed on forests used for timber extraction. Most timber exploitation is carried out unsustainably, which causes forest degradation. Two important mechanisms have emerged to promote sustainable forest management: certification and community‐based forest management (CFM). We synthesize the published information about how forest certification and CFM perform in terms of environmental, social, and economic variables. With the caveat that very few published studies meet the standards for formal impact evaluation, we found that certification has substantial environmental benefits, typically achieved at a cost of reduced short‐term financial profit, and accompanied by some improvement to the welfare of neighboring communities. We found that the economic and environmental benefits of CFM are understudied, but that the social impacts are controversial, with both positive and negative changes reported. We identify the trade‐offs that likely caused these conflicting results and that, if addressed, would help both CFM and certification deliver the hoped‐for benefits.

Recording of forest soundscapes can help monitor animal biodiversity for conservation

There is global concern about tropical forest degradation, in part, because of the associated loss of biodiversity. Communities and indigenous people play a fundamental role in tropical forest management and are often efficient at preventing forest degradation. However, monitoring changes in biodiversity due to degradation, especially at a scale appropriate to local tropical forest management, is plagued by difficulties, including the need for expert training, inconsistencies across observers, and lack of baseline or reference data. We used a new biodiversity remote‐sensing technology, the recording of soundscapes, to test whether the acoustic saturation of a tropical forest in Papua New Guinea decreases as land‐use intensity by the communities that manage the forest increases. We sampled soundscapes continuously for 24 hours at 34 sites in different land‐use zones of 3 communities. Land‐use zones where forest cover was fully retained had significantly higher soundscape saturation during peak acoustic activity times (i.e., dawn and dusk chorus) compared with land‐use types with fragmented forest cover. We conclude that, in Papua New Guinea, the relatively simple measure of soundscape saturation may provide a cheap, objective, reproducible, and effective tool for monitoring tropical forest deviation from an intact state, particularly if it is used to detect the presence of intact dawn and dusk choruses.