Social network analysis and the implications for Pontocaspian biodiversity conservation in Romania and Ukraine: A comparative study

factors limiting collaboration. Besides the general lack of funding available for research and conservation, which was a common characteristic of both themes, ‘budget constraints’ also referred to unfavorable funding schemes in Ukraine which restricted the participation of dif- ferent stakeholder categories in a project [17]. However, ‘budget constraints’ did not have effect on exchange of information in Ukraine, while ‘lack of funding’ in Romania affected the access to biodiversity and environmental information (see S2 Table). Besides publicly funded projects in Romania, the EU LIFE Program is the major source for conservation funding [61]. An earlier study on collaboration networks across Europe found that once a project was awarded to an organization in Romania, such organization became less prone to collaborate with other organizations in other projects, so project management experiences were not shared among stakeholders [62]. This was attributed to difficulties in the implementation of EU LIFE projects [62]. Additionally, according to our findings the reduced collaboration occurred also due to institutional competition among stakeholders which encouraged organi- zations to keep data to themselves as a competitive advantage to attract future grants (see S2 Table; theme ‘lack of funding’). Fig 3. Frequencies of interaction themes among the stakeholder organizations. Values in the pie charts represent absolute number of times each theme was mentioned. See theme definitions in S2 Table. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0221833.g003 PLOS ONE

Social network analysis and the implications for Pontocaspian biodiversity conservation in Romania and Ukraine PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0221833 October 23, 2020 10 / 20