Reliable synthesis of the various rapidly expanding bodies of evidence is vital for the process of evidence-informed decision-making in environmental policy, practice and research. With the rise of evidence-base medicine and increasing
numbers of published systematic reviews, criteria for assessing the quality of reporting have been developed.
First QUOROM (Lancet 354:1896–1900, 1999) and then PRISMA (Ann Intern Med 151:264, 2009) were developed as
reporting guidelines and standards to ensure medical meta-analyses and systematic reviews are reported to a high
level of detail. PRISMA is now widely used by a range of journals as a pre-submission checklist. However, due to its
development for systematic reviews in healthcare, PRISMA has limited applicability for reviews in conservation and
environmental management. We highlight 12 key problems with the application of PRISMA to this field, including
an overemphasis on meta-analysis and no consideration for other synthesis methods. We introduce ROSES (RepOrting
standards for Systematic Evidence Syntheses), a pro forma and flow diagram designed specifically for systematic
reviews and systematic maps in the field of conservation and environmental management. We describe how ROSES
solves the problems with PRISMA. We outline the key benefits of our approach to designing ROSES, in particular the
level of detail and inclusion of rich guidance statements. We also introduce the extraction of meta-data that describe
key aspects of the conduct of the review. Collated together, this summary record can help to facilitate rapid review
and appraisal of the conduct of a systematic review or map, potentially speeding up the peer-review process. We present
the results of initial road testing of ROSES with systematic review experts, and propose a plan for future development
of ROSES.