Dealing with false positive risk as an indicator of misperceived effectiveness of conservation interventions.

As human pressures on the environment continue to spread and intensify, effective conservation interventions are direly needed to prevent threats, reduce conflicts, and recover populations and landscapes in a liaison between science and conservation. It is practically important to discriminate betwe...

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Autor principal:	Igor Khorozyan
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2021
Materias:	Medicine R Science Q
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/f66e99ce871e4f9b91ad10e810eb1075
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:f66e99ce871e4f9b91ad10e810eb10752021-12-02T20:15:09ZDealing with false positive risk as an indicator of misperceived effectiveness of conservation interventions.1932-620310.1371/journal.pone.0255784https://doaj.org/article/f66e99ce871e4f9b91ad10e810eb10752021-01-01T00:00:00Zhttps://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0255784https://doaj.org/toc/1932-6203As human pressures on the environment continue to spread and intensify, effective conservation interventions are direly needed to prevent threats, reduce conflicts, and recover populations and landscapes in a liaison between science and conservation. It is practically important to discriminate between true and false (or misperceived) effectiveness of interventions as false perceptions may shape a wrong conservation agenda and lead to inappropriate decisions and management actions. This study used the false positive risk (FPR) to estimate the rates of misperceived effectiveness of electric fences (overstated if reported as effective but actually ineffective based on FPR; understated otherwise), explain their causes and propose recommendations on how to improve the representation of true effectiveness. Electric fences are widely applied to reduce damage to fenced assets, such as livestock and beehives, or increase survival of fenced populations. The analysis of 109 cases from 50 publications has shown that the effectiveness of electric fences was overstated in at least one-third of cases, from 31.8% at FPR = 0.2 (20% risk) to 51.1% at FPR = 0.05 (5% risk, true effectiveness). In contrast, understatement reduced from 23.8% to 9.5% at these thresholds of FPR. This means that truly effective applications of electric fences were only 48.9% of all cases reported as effective, but truly ineffective cases were 90.5%, implying that the effectiveness of electric fences was heavily overstated. The main reasons of this bias were the lack of statistical testing or improper reporting of test results (63.3% of cases) and interpretation of marginally significant results (p < 0.05, p < 0.1 and p around 0.05) as indicators of effectiveness (10.1%). In conclusion, FPR is an important tool for estimating true effectiveness of conservation interventions and its application is highly recommended to disentangle true and false effectiveness for planning appropriate conservation actions. Researchers are encouraged to calculate FPR, publish its constituent statistics (especially treatment and control sample sizes) and explicitly provide test results with p values. It is suggested to call the effectiveness "true" if FPR < 0.05, "suggestive" if 0.05 ≤ FPR < 0.2 and "false" if FPR ≥ 0.2.Igor KhorozyanPublic Library of Science (PLoS)articleMedicineRScienceQENPLoS ONE, Vol 16, Iss 8, p e0255784 (2021)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	Medicine R Science Q
spellingShingle	Medicine R Science Q Igor Khorozyan Dealing with false positive risk as an indicator of misperceived effectiveness of conservation interventions.
description	As human pressures on the environment continue to spread and intensify, effective conservation interventions are direly needed to prevent threats, reduce conflicts, and recover populations and landscapes in a liaison between science and conservation. It is practically important to discriminate between true and false (or misperceived) effectiveness of interventions as false perceptions may shape a wrong conservation agenda and lead to inappropriate decisions and management actions. This study used the false positive risk (FPR) to estimate the rates of misperceived effectiveness of electric fences (overstated if reported as effective but actually ineffective based on FPR; understated otherwise), explain their causes and propose recommendations on how to improve the representation of true effectiveness. Electric fences are widely applied to reduce damage to fenced assets, such as livestock and beehives, or increase survival of fenced populations. The analysis of 109 cases from 50 publications has shown that the effectiveness of electric fences was overstated in at least one-third of cases, from 31.8% at FPR = 0.2 (20% risk) to 51.1% at FPR = 0.05 (5% risk, true effectiveness). In contrast, understatement reduced from 23.8% to 9.5% at these thresholds of FPR. This means that truly effective applications of electric fences were only 48.9% of all cases reported as effective, but truly ineffective cases were 90.5%, implying that the effectiveness of electric fences was heavily overstated. The main reasons of this bias were the lack of statistical testing or improper reporting of test results (63.3% of cases) and interpretation of marginally significant results (p < 0.05, p < 0.1 and p around 0.05) as indicators of effectiveness (10.1%). In conclusion, FPR is an important tool for estimating true effectiveness of conservation interventions and its application is highly recommended to disentangle true and false effectiveness for planning appropriate conservation actions. Researchers are encouraged to calculate FPR, publish its constituent statistics (especially treatment and control sample sizes) and explicitly provide test results with p values. It is suggested to call the effectiveness "true" if FPR < 0.05, "suggestive" if 0.05 ≤ FPR < 0.2 and "false" if FPR ≥ 0.2.
format	article
author	Igor Khorozyan
author_facet	Igor Khorozyan
author_sort	Igor Khorozyan
title	Dealing with false positive risk as an indicator of misperceived effectiveness of conservation interventions.
title_short	Dealing with false positive risk as an indicator of misperceived effectiveness of conservation interventions.
title_full	Dealing with false positive risk as an indicator of misperceived effectiveness of conservation interventions.
title_fullStr	Dealing with false positive risk as an indicator of misperceived effectiveness of conservation interventions.
title_full_unstemmed	Dealing with false positive risk as an indicator of misperceived effectiveness of conservation interventions.
title_sort	dealing with false positive risk as an indicator of misperceived effectiveness of conservation interventions.
publisher	Public Library of Science (PLoS)
publishDate	2021
url	https://doaj.org/article/f66e99ce871e4f9b91ad10e810eb1075
work_keys_str_mv	AT igorkhorozyan dealingwithfalsepositiveriskasanindicatorofmisperceivedeffectivenessofconservationinterventions
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Dealing with false positive risk as an indicator of misperceived effectiveness of conservation interventions.

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