How do we know if development aid is spent effectively and delivering results? Aid effectiveness has become an important discussion point in international development in recent years, leading to renewed focus on how to measure the performance of development programmes, which is Theme 3 of the ESRC-DFID call. Measuring results is difficult because the results depend on what you chose to measure, when, for whom, and how it is measured. A second difficulty is attribution: how do you know that changes are due to development interventions, as opposed to other ongoing processes. Rigorous impact evaluation methodologies have been developed to address the problem of attribution by comparing intervention sites to controls. However, impact evaluation methods have tended to focus on standard economic measures of human wellbeing (e.g. income), which may not capture outcomes considered relevant by local people - such as resource tenure, education, ability to insure against shocks, or political power. This project focuses on interventions designed to counter increasing environmental resource scarcity, caused by unsustainable use of biodiversity, deforestation, and degradation of ecosystem services, arguably some of the greatest long-term threats to human wellbeing. Understanding the processes that cause resource scarcity and what are effective interventions to address resource scarcity are relevant to Theme 1 of the call. Environment-development interventions are also some of the hardest to assess, since the processes that cause environmental resource scarcity are often very complex, and potentially affect multiple aspects of human wellbeing (not just income). For this reason, credible evaluations of their medium to long-term impacts on human wellbeing are few, providing little evidence to inform decision-makers about what works, for whom, and why. The project aims to directly improve the implementation of policies in the environment-development sector through enhanced understanding of what works, based on more appropriate measurement of results. It brings together the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS, a science-based environmental organization working in over 60 countries), and two of the UK's foremost academics in the field from University College London and Imperial College, as well as local and national partners. The project has three components: (1) a methodological research component, which focuses on how to measure the development impacts of environment-development interventions on the poor (2) a field research component, which will test the different methodological approaches with developing country researchers at 3 sites (2 in Africa and 1 in Asia) that have very different social, cultural and political settings, to see how methods perform in different circumstances and to specifically evaluate 3 field interventions focused on Payments for Ecosystem Services (3) a practical component, which will use the results of the research to directly inform how environment-development projects are implemented in the field, building upon the consortium's networks of partners and programmes. The research responds directly to the growing demand for knowledge about how to measure the performance of development programmes, and the specific paucity of impact evaluations in the environment-development sector. The research will therefore be high impact: both academically, in terms of publications, and for policymakers and practitioners because it responds to already-identified needs for information. The field component focuses on incentive mechanisms, such as Payments for Ecosystem Services, which have been widely promoted over the past decade as a more equitable way to ensure poverty alleviation and sustainable environmental resource management. Through the project's networks and partners, the results will directly impact how current environment-development policies are implemented, and will inform the design of future initiatives.

Human-caused environmental destruction is a major challenge to the sustainability of life on earth. For effective solutions, we need to learn about damaging behaviours and discover how best to encourage change. Exciting developments in fields concerned with human behaviour (such as economics and psychology) are helping to explain why people make the decisions they do. In parallel, ecologists have developed sophisticated methods for analysing data collected by ordinary people ("citizen scientists"), aided by new technologies such as smart phones. Up to now, these developments have remained separate, but closer integration would benefit both science and practice. Behavioural scientists would gain from the adoption of powerful new analytical techniques from ecology, which enable them to use data collected in new ways to understand how humans interact with the environment. Ecologists would benefit from being able to include a solid theoretical model of human behaviour into their understanding of how ecological outcomes arise from human actions. Managers and policy-makers will benefit from evidence-based understanding of how to change behaviour in the real world. To illustrate how powerful this combination of approaches can be, we will apply them to a key problem facing global conservation: how to manage protected areas so that they can act as effective refuges for endangered species in the face of illegal poaching and other threats. Learning about illegal behaviour is difficult because those involved are rarely willing to talk openly, so the 'conservation detective' must make deductions from other sources of information. Many conservation organisations now collect reports made by the rangers who patrol parks. This is potentially very informative, but also potentially very misleading. Consider snaring as an example: a ranger seeing a snare is the outcome of several interacting processes (where the poacher decides to lay their snare, where the ranger decides to patrol, and whether the ranger spots it in the undergrowth), and removing that snare may affect the future decisions of the poacher; so the data are the product of a game of cat-and-mouse played out in a dynamic landscape. This makes patrol data very hard to interpret. To tackle this issue we will build two types of computer model to explore how rangers and poachers interact with one another and their environment: i) conceptual models of the underlying processes that lead to the observation of a snare, based on ecological and behavioural theory and our understanding of our system, with simulated patrol records as their outcome; ii) statistical models that start with the snare data, and see which combination of factors best explains it. Building both models means that each can be used to inform the other. We will test the models in two ways; firstly in an abstract system, where we can vary the behaviour of the patrollers and poachers and the environment in which they interact, and see how this affects the resultant patterns of snare observations, and secondly in a real-world system, the Seima Protection Forest in Cambodia. Here we have substantial existing knowledge to help us to build our models, and will collect new information to improve our understanding. Our work will also be able directly to inform their conservation strategy. For the first time it will be possible to paint an accurate picture of illegal behaviour within parks and to give managers scientific advice about how to design their patrols. We will also explore how this novel approach can be used more widely to tackle other environmental issues. For example, large numbers of people participate in bird surveys each year, and local communities are increasingly collecting information so that they can manage their own resources; our work will lead to rules of thumb for how best to analyse these types of data. This could be useful to a wide range of ecologists and practical users of observational data.

The idea of succession, or change over time in the composition of a community, has been fundamental to ecology since the early 20th century, and underpins the science needed to tackle the consequences of environmental change. However, until very recently, the difficulties of obtaining sufficient data meant that predicting the dynamics of communities of even ten or twenty species was almost impossible. This situation has changed dramatically in the last few years, with increasing availability of large ecological data sets making this the right time to revisit basic questions about community dynamics. We will develop our approach using data on two important and threatened community types: coral reefs (using recent monitoring data) and temperate forests (using pollen records from the last 10000 years). In the longer term, our approach will be relevant to many other types of community. We will first examine the measurement of rate of change in community composition. The measures currently used by ecologists fail a basic test: if every species in a community is growing at a constant rate, these measures are not constant. Thus they cannot give meaningful answers to simple questions such as whether human activity affects the rate of succession. We will develop a new approach based on geometrical principles, which resolves this difficulty and provides the rigorous foundations for our further work. In most cases, we can only observe changes in community composition over time scales much shorter than those needed to determine the eventual outcome of the process. We will therefore develop new ways of modelling short-term change in the composition of a community. We will use large amounts of data on short-term change in coral reefs and forests to construct stochastic models of compositional dynamics. In the geometrical framework that we propose, it is relatively simple to project future changes in composition, based on the current composition of a community and the environmental conditions. We will then analyze the long-term behaviour of these models. This will tell us about the outcome of succession over time scales that we cannot observe directly. For example, we can project the long-term consequences of increased sea surface temperature on coral reefs, or of increased human activity on forests. Our models are stochastic, and so in the long term the outcome will be a probability distribution of likely and unlikely compositions. We therefore require new ways of thinking about the stability of communities. Rather than equilibrium states to which a community will return after disturbance, we will identify sets of compositions that are likely to persist over time. Our research addresses basic ecological questions, and has great relevance to the challenges currently facing society. Environmental conditions such as sea surface temperature and the intensity of human activity are changing rapidly. Our work will provide rigorous methods for predicting the likely consequences of these changes.

This project proposes to form a consortium of partners from the United Kingdom, Tanzania, Rwanda, Bolivia, Brazil and the United States to develop a research framework that will help fill knowledge gaps related to how climate change will impact provisioning and regulatory ecosystem services; how these changes might affect rural livelihoods; and how governance solutions can be developed to help manage those changes in countries of the Amazon and Sub-Saharan Africa. This research will generate new data and understandings while building developing country capacity to design and implement policy relevant research on the impacts of climate change on ecosystem services and rural livelihoods. Our research will be conducted at four sites where the ecosystem services provided by forests and hydrological systems are highly interdependent ecologically and integral to local and, in most cases, national economies, and are at risk of major disruption from climate change. These sites include the Great Ruaha river landscape in Tanzania; the Nyungwe forest in Rwanda; the Madidi landscape of Bolivia; and the flooded (várzea) forest landscape in Mamiraua, Brazil. We will develop systems dynamic models of climate, ecosystem services and rural livelihoods in these landscapes, and combine these with participatory assessments of governance options, across a range of spatial and political scales. The models will acknowledge that regulatory and provisioning services are ecologically interdependent, which will permit an exploration of synergies and trade-offs in these ecosystem services under various management regimes. The role that hydrological systems and watershed management play in regulating flows of provisioning services is the common thread that binds these sites, however, the ecological and socio-political differences across sites will make the policy implications of research results broadly applicable to other locations in the Amazon and Sub-Saharan Africa. Combined, the sites will allow us to speak to a variety of water-livelihood interactions related to fisheries, energy, agriculture, sanitation and tourism, and to a range of governance contexts. These are sites where the consortium's existing data bases and local relationships are especially well developed, allowing us to conduct both quantitative modeling and qualitative research with the greatest effectiveness and efficiency. Through a series of informal preparatory meetings, consortium members and local partners will initiate a participatory process to design a research program to assess the impact of climate change on ecosystem services provision and local livelihoods. Through WebEx sessions, we will host virtual meetings to exchange ideas that will lay the foundation for a consortium planning workshop in Bolivia to consolidate the interdisciplinary team and identify research needs at each site. The workshop will produce a research program designed to identify major knowledge gaps in existing data and capacity building priorities and estimate the level of funding required to support the proposed research. This grant will enable us to develop a framework for building a cadre of researchers with the skills needed to assess climate change impacts on ecosystem services and rural livelihoods for informing policy makers. By working collaboratively across sites, the program will foster direct south-south exchange of skills and knowledge and build the collegial relationships needed for future joint research. Strengthening capacity to conduct policy relevant research is critical for guiding development decisions that enhance local and national resilience to ecological, economic and social shocks linked to climate change. As a result of this proposed program, our partners and their communities in developing nations will be better prepared to adapt to climate change and to manage ecosystem services for the benefit of the rural poor.

Deforestation and forest degradation are causing widespread loss of tropical biodiversity, profoundly impacting ecosystem functioning as well as stocks of natural resources and ecosystem assets (natural capital). The greatest reductions in diversity are experienced as forests are converted to permanent agriculture, a process that disrupts the delivery of important ecosystem services such as pollination and pest control. In contrast, the impacts from well-managed smallholder agriculture are less extreme, as the associated land parcels are typically embedded within landscape mosaics comprising fallows and forest remnants. Wallacea is currently emerging as a new developmental frontier in Indonesia and a target for agribusiness and extractive industries. A particularly understudied part of the Asian tropics, it has an exceptionally distinctive vertebrate diversity which forms the second highest level of endemism in the world, making the region a global priority for both conservation and ecosystem service provision. In addition, land-use history and current trajectories remain poorly understood, with the region notably omitted from recent deforestation baselines for this very reason. In fact, the diverse history of the Wallacea archipelago is acknowledged as a major source of uncertainty when applying land-use change models developed from elsewhere in Southeast Asia, as well as predicting the impacts of future environmental change. Given that further forest degradation and agricultural conversion are expected in Wallacea, the future prospects for natural capital in the region depend to a large extent on how we manage human-modified landscapes. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team from British and Indonesian universities, with four NGO partners active in Wallacea, this project will deliver the science needed to understand tensions in land-use and the responses of biodiversity to environmental change in Wallacea. We propose a novel and ambitious study of biodiversity responses to recent and historical land-cover change across multiple landscapes in little-studied islands, so that evaluations of current land-use policies and predictions of future environmental scenarios will be evidence-based and realistic. More specifically, spatial trajectories of land-cover change will be generated for each landscape, drawing from publicly-available remote-sensed data and local land-use plans. This will enable us to hindcast forest cover back to Wallace's time and forecast to key target years for international policy commitments (e.g. 2030 for the UN Sustainable Development Goals and 2050s for the UN Framework on Climate Change). Significantly, we will generate new biodiversity data from across land-cover gradients in forests, agroforests and intensive farmland (e.g. cocoa, oil palm, coffee), model community responses to past, present and future forest cover, and apply state-of-the-art genomics methods to assess genetic and evolutionary responses to land-cover change for several important conservation flagship species (NERC-Ristekdikti programme's Goals 1 and 2). Focusing on terrestrial vertebrates, the fauna that environmental policies aiming at safeguarding biodiversity are typically focused upon, we will track Alfred Russel Wallace's journey through Sulawesi and the Moluccas (Maluku). Finally, with collaboration from Project Partners with additional expertise in Wallacea, we will evaluate the impact of current land-use policies on ecosystem assets and dependent human beneficiaries, drawing on our land-cover, biodiversity and additional carbon and socio-economic data (Programme's Goals 2 and 3). Because many provinces in Indonesia are yet to implement newly-required spatial planning processes, our joint environmental research has an unprecedented opportunity to inform local development.