Protected areas are under immense pressure to safeguard much of the remaining global biodiversity and can be strained by unpredicted events such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Understanding the extent of the effects of the pandemic on protected area management and conservation outcomes is critical for recovery and future planning to buffer against these types of events. We used survey and focus group data to measure the perceived impact of the pandemic on protected areas in Mexico and outline the pathways that led to these conservation outcomes. Across 62 protected areas, we found substantial changes in management capacity, monitoring and tourism, and a slight increase in non-compliant activities. Our findings highlight the need to integrate short-term relief plans to support communities dependent on tourism, who were particularly vulnerable during the pandemic, and to increase access to technology and technical capacity to better sustain management activities during future crises.

Capacity development is critical to long-term conservation success, yet we lack a robust and rigorous understanding of how well its effects are being evaluated. A comprehensive summary of who is monitoring and evaluating capacity development interventions, what is being evaluated and how, would help in the development of evidence-based guidance to inform design and implementation decisions for future capacity development interventions and evaluations of their effectiveness. We built an evidence map by reviewing peer-reviewed and grey literature published since 2000, to identify case studies evaluating capacity development interventions in biodiversity conservation and natural resource management. We used inductive and deductive approaches to develop a coding strategy for studies that met our criteria, extracting data on the type of capacity development intervention, evaluation methods, data and analysis types, categories of outputs and outcomes assessed, and whether the study had a clear causal model and/or used a systems approach. We found that almost all studies assessed multiple outcome types: most frequent was change in knowledge, followed by behaviour, then attitude. Few studies evaluated conservation outcomes. Less than half included an explicit causal model linking interventions to expected outcomes. Half of the studies considered external factors that could influence the efficacy of the capacity development intervention, and few used an explicit systems approach. We used framework synthesis to situate our evidence map within the broader literature on capacity development evaluation. Our evidence map (including a visual heat map) highlights areas of low and high representation in investment in research on the evaluation of capacity development.