Zoos and reintroductions: challenges and opportunities

The world is facing a biodiversity crisis and populations of surviving species have substantially declined.

The world is facing a biodiversity crisis and populations of surviving species have substantially declined. This has led to small and fragmented wildlife populations that are then at greater risk of extinction from intrinsic population factors and chance events. Conservation translocations, including reintroductions, can counter and reverse some of these effects by demographically or genetically augmenting small wild populations or re‐establishing new ones. Zoos and aquaria are developing into conservation organisations, and have a suite of expertise and experience that can be applied to securing populations of threatened species through conservation translocations. The papers in the latest volume (51) of the International Zoo Yearbook, guest edited by Marwell Wildlife’s Tania Gilbert and the IUCN SSC Reintroduction Specialist Group’s Program Officer Pritpal Soorae, provide examples of this, and highlight some of the challenges and solutions associated with this area of conservation

http://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1748-1090/