Editorial: An Important Review of Plant Reintroductions

Abstract

In this issue of Biological Conservation is an important article by Sandrine Godefroid and 19 co-authors, entitled: How successful are plant species reintroductions? The authors used the published literature and questionnaires to evaluate the success of 249 projects involving plant reintroductions. This survey was designed to reach into the gray literature and other sources of data not reported in journals. The study provides a valuable complement to the reviews of animal reintroduction published over the past 20 years. Surprisingly, until this article, there have not been comparable review articles on plant reintroduction. For the readers of Biological Conservation, this article has a number of noteworthy lessons. First, the rate of success of plant reintroductions, as measured by plant survival, reported in the published literature is 78% but the rate of success reported in questionnaires answered by researchers working in the this field is only 33%. The results suggest that researchers are seven times more likely to publish their results when reintroductions are successful or at least partially successful. Thus, a survey of the literature will suggest that plant reintroductions will have a high probability of success, but in fact reintroductions have low probability of success. Consequently, the protection and management of existing plant populations is still the highest priority for conservation efforts, and the creation of new populations should be undertaken either to complement these efforts or as a last resort. Because of this low rate of success, reintroduction efforts should not be used to justify removing existing populations. Second, as a more general point, this tendency to report positive results, if substantiated, represents a serious problem in the literature of conservation biology that may present an overly optimistic picture of our ability to solve problems.