Reintroductions of native plant species to the United Kingdom

Abstract

Zoos can play a key role in the conservation of native plant species, and projects concerning the reintroduction and reinforcement of local plant populations are potentially an ideal way to involve visitors and local communities in practical conservation. However, such projects need to be clearly thought through and designed correctly from the start. Knowledge and understanding of relevant International Union for Conservation of Nature guidelines are important to ensure that reintroductions are ethical and sustainable. Many zoological institutions tend not to get involved in such local projects, favouring more exotic and attention‐grabbing conservation programmes. Chester Zoo, UK, has engaged with partners and worked with various native plant species, predominantly in Cheshire and North Wales, including Black poplar Populusnigra ssp betulifolia, Common barberry Berberis vulgaris and Common juniper Juniperus communis. There have been a number of key lessons learned, which can be applied to the design and management of future projects.

Ex situ collections and their potential for the restoration of extinct plants

“…Collections of living specimens include those in public botanic gardens, private gardens, community gardens, arboreta, nurseries, and zoos (hereafter botanic garden) (Bird et al 2017). Botanic gardens are very effective in increasing plant stocks through ex situ propagation, and although a large proportion of plants in botanic gardens are common ornamentals, the cultivation of rare and threatened species for conservation purposes (including conservation translocations [Heywood 2017]) (examples in Table 2) has become increasingly important (Mounce et al 2017).…”

Editorial: The Role of Zoos and Aquariums in Reintroductions and Other Conservation Translocations

“…There is a large and extensive literature on reintroductions covering all aspects of conservation translocations and reintroduction biology. This volume of the International Zoo Yearbook focuses on the roles that zoos and aquariums have in re-establishing or reinforcing populations in the wild, and provides examples of reintroductions using wild (Astore et al, 2017;Bird et al, 2017;Daltry et al, 2017;Ettling et al, 2017;Nightingale et al, 2017;Parrott et al, 2017) or captive populations (Astore et al, 2017;Bird et al, 2017;Fritz et al, 2017;Hogg et al, 2017;Mawson & Lambert, 2017;Nightingale et al, 2017;Parrott et al, 2017;Woodfine et al, 2017), reinforcements using captive populations (Bird et al, 2017;Ettling et al, 2017) and assisted colonizations (Gardiner et al, 2017;Fraser et al, 2017). The papers in this volume cover a range of animal and plant taxa, and present species-specific reintroduction case studies that highlight particular challenges, such as biosecurity and disease management (Hogg et al, 2017;Nightingale et al, 2017;Woodfine et al, 2017), the impact of invasive species (Daltry et al, 2017;Nightingale et al, 2017) and introduced predators (Parrott et al, 2017) on native biodiversity, as well as broader review articles on the role that zoos and aquariums have in reintroductions and reinforcements (Fraser et al, 2017;Gilbert et al, 2017), and many of the articles describe the processes associated with conservation translocations.…”

“…Similarly, Hogg et al (2017) detail an integrated species-conservation strategy for the Tasmanian devil Sarcophilus harrisii that includes the management of a metapopulation across zoo-based facilities, free-ranging enclosures, an island and a fenced peninsula in the presence of a contagious lethal cancer, the devil facial tumour disease. Other papers firmly place species reintroductions and reinforcements into strategic landscape-scale conservation projects where the roles of captive breeding and conservation translocation are born out of the identified conservation needs of the species or ecosystems (Bird et al, 2017;Gardiner et al, 2017;Nightingale et al, 2017).…”

“…Zoos and aquariums have considerable experience in managing a variety of taxa resulting in them being well placed to contribute to a wide range of conservationtranslocation projects. The papers in this volume exemplify how zoos and aquariums can participate in such projects for birds (Astore et al, 2017;Fraser et al, 2017;Fritz et al, 2017;Mawson & Lambert, 2017), mammals (Hogg et al, 2017;Mawson & Lambert, 2017;Parrott et al, 2017), reptiles (Daltry et al, 2017;Fraser et al, 2017;Mawson & Lambert, 2017;Woodfine et al, 2017), amphibians (Ettling et al, 2017;Mawson & Lambert, 2017), terrestrial invertebrates (Gardiner et al, 2017), aquatic invertebrates (Nightingale et al, 2017) and plants (Bird et al, 2017). This volume does not contain any case studies of conservation-translocation projects for fish, and although zoos and aquariums have certainly been involved in re-establishing fish populations in the wild (e.g.…”