The scientific councils of natural protected areas as a window on the epistemic landscape of the conservation knowing-doing space

In environmental management, like in other applied operational domains, concrete actions are often at odds with state-of-the-art theoretical knowledge. Institutional settings organizing the way scientific knowledge is applied in environmental management practice play an active role in structuring such knowledge-action discrepancies. Scientific councils of protected areas are key institutions playing this role. Their two main missions are (1) to design, monitor, and evaluate the production of knowledge inside protected areas, and (2) to advise managers as to designing and implementing conservation actions. This article explores a database gathering information on scientific councils in France. The case of this country is exemplary because the existence of scientific councils is systematic in its protected areas, and their structure is streamlined by regulatory requirements. We use this database to investigate the publication records of the members of these scientific councils. This enables us to shed a quantitative light on the “epistemic landscape” (i.e., the kinds of knowledge and knowledge-holders that play a key role in interactions between science and practice) that scientific councils materialize. Our findings suggest that this epistemic landscape is poorly connected to the concerned protected areas. Moreover, some prominent topics in academic research (functional ecology, invasion biology and conservation planning) appear to be neglected in the recollected publication records. Such results prompt the question of whether the composition of SCs should be adjusted to reinforce the role of scientists tackling research questions applied to the PA at issue, and to better reflect scientific priorities in the conservation literature. Though results solely based on bibliometric analysis should be interpreted with due caution, they are useful to open debates on how to improve the design of institutions structuring knowing-doing spaces, beyond the specific case of French scientific councils.