Table 1.

Glossary of important terms.

policy
targets	qualitative or quantitative aspirational statements about protected-area achievements, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity's Aichi targets [17]
measures	quantitative ways of stating policy targets or gauging progress towards them (examples are in figure 1)

conservation planning
goals	high-level, qualitative statements about the intended consequence(s) of conservation actions [22]
objectives	more specific statements than goals, expressed quantitatively, that interpret goals through the filter of available information [22], relating here to operational decisions about planning and management of protected areas
actions	protected areas themselves or types of protective management or restoration, both within and outside protected areas [23,24], equivalent to attributes in impact evaluation (below)
measures	quantitative ways of stating objectives or gauging progress towards them (examples are in figure 1)

performance management
inputs	investments in protected-area programs or the raw materials for actions related to protected areas [25]
outputs	the concrete, countable products of one or more conservation actions [25]
outcomes	the assumed short- and medium-term effects of an intervention's outputs [25], further defined here as measured only within protected areas (figure 2)
assumptions	hypotheses about factors that could affect the progress or success of actions, made explicit in theory-based evaluations that systematically track anticipated results chains [25]

impact evaluation
impact	the value added to a counterfactual estimate of a variable of conservation interest [3,4]
attributes	actions (see above), described by type and amount, that define protected-area treatments [26]
treatments	forms of protection and approaches to management, defined by attributes [26]
mechanisms	in this article, threats to biodiversity, affected by treatments [26]
moderators	variables not affected by treatments but modifying the impact arising from treatments [26]
assumptions	hypotheses about factors that could affect the progress or success of attributes (actions) and treatments, made explicit in theory-based evaluations that systematically track paths to impact [7]