Conservation translocations: a review of common difficulties and promising directions

Abstract

Translocations are a common conservation and management strategy, but despite their popularity, translocations are a high‐cost endeavor with a history of failures. It is therefore imperative to maximize their success by learning from our collective experience. The Global Re‐introduction Perspectives Series is a collection of conservation translocation case studies, generated by the IUCN’s Conservation Translocation Specialist Group, and presented in a structured format with an emphasis on practical information. All 293 animal translocation case studies to date include a section in which the authors list the difficulties they have faced during the translocation project, with over 1200 difficulties described so far. We reviewed all difficulties reported in the series to get insights into the common perceived difficulties faced by wildlife managers during animal translocations. The most reported‐upon problems had to do with animal behavior, followed by monitoring difficulties, lack of funding, quality of release habitat, lack of baseline knowledge and lack of public support. We scrutinized each of these difficulties to highlight future research directions that are most likely to improve translocation success, and put a special emphasis on difficulties stemming from animal behavior, and on solutions that may alleviate these problems and improve conservation translocation success world‐wide.

Suction samplers are a valuable tool to sample arthropod assemblages for conservation translocation

“…Translocation projects are often expensive and time consuming (Fischer & Lindenmayer, 2000; Carter et al, 2017; Berger‐Tal et al, 2019). An advantage of using a suction sampler for translocation is the little material requirements – no heavy machinery is needed for transportation and handling can be done by a single operator.…”

“…However, it may be reasonable to reintroduce entire assemblages of dispersal‐limited arthropod species as an accompanying measure to plant reintroductions (Baur, 2014). As with plants, species‐rich source populations and suitable target patches must be available (Berger‐Tal et al, 2019; Bubac et al, 2019). Additionally, large numbers of individuals for translocation are necessary (Fischer & Lindenmayer, 2000).…”

Adjusting the Prerelease Gut Microbial Community by Diet Training to Improve the Postrelease Fitness of Captive-Bred Acipenser dabryanus

“…Prerelease conditioning has been proven to generally effectively improve short-term postrelease survival (Batson et al, 2015;Tetzlaff et al, 2019). However, starvation is still a significant source of mortality in captive carnivores post release, and foraging deficiencies are underrepresented in the literature (Berger Tal et al, 2019).…”

“…As approximately one-third of postrelease mortality takes place within the first month after release (Tavecchia et al, 2009), short-term postrelease survival is crucial for the success of reintroduction projects (Armstrong and Seddon, 2008;Bertolero et al, 2018;Cayuela et al, 2019). Starvation has been implicated as a significant source of mortality in the first weeks to months in reintroduced captive carnivores (Jule et al, 2008;Kemp and Roshier, 2016;Berger Tal et al, 2019). Better diet training could improve reintroduced individuals' foraging behavior and thereby improve short-term postrelease survival (Whiteside et al, 2015;Berger Tal et al, 2019).…”

“…Starvation has been implicated as a significant source of mortality in the first weeks to months in reintroduced captive carnivores (Jule et al, 2008;Kemp and Roshier, 2016;Berger Tal et al, 2019). Better diet training could improve reintroduced individuals' foraging behavior and thereby improve short-term postrelease survival (Whiteside et al, 2015;Berger Tal et al, 2019). As diet training can adjust hosts' gut microbes, impact hosts' diet preference, and then influence short-term postrelease survival rates, for better reintroduction effects, improved source populations with improved diet training are needed.…”