Abstract
Wildlife reintroduction programs are a type of conservation initiative that seek to re-establish viable populations of a species in areas from which they have been extirpated or become extinct. Past efforts to improve the outcomes of reintroduction have focused heavily on overcoming ecological challenges, with little attention paid to the potential influence of leadership, management, and other aspects of reintroduction. This 2009 survey of reintroduction practitioners identified several key areas of leadership and management that may deserve further study, including: (i) the potential value of reintroduction partnerships for improving programmatic outcomes; (ii) the potential management value of autonomy vs. hierarchy in organizational structure; (iii) gaps in perceptions of success in reintroduction; and (iv) the need for improved evaluations of reintroduction programs and outcomes.
Highlights
We suggest that another, overlooked, area of significant influence might lie in the human dimensions of reintroduction the types of leadership and styles of management under which reintroduction programs are operated
Survey design The survey was designed subsequent to a case study of the leadership and management of the Sea Eagle Recovery Project, undertaken from May 2008 to August 2009 (Sutton, unpublished data)
An additional 40 (9.98%) responded to email invitations and stated that (a) they no longer worked in the field; (b) they had only conducted retrospective analyses of reintroduction and not participated in a program; or (c) they did not, for other reasons, wish to share their experiences
Summary
In the fight to preserve global biodiversity, conservationists and biologists must make use of every available tool and approach. They are employed only in cases of significant biodiversity loss, and are subsequently operating under more dire conditions than any other type of conservation initiative Regardless, they maintain a low success rate, estimated in the past 12 years between 26% and 32% (Fischer & Lindemeyer, 2000; Jule et al, 2008). Reliable data on reintroduction management is limited and restricted almost entirely to the gray (i.e. informally published) literature, with the exception of (Clark & Westrum’s, 1989) paper on high-performance teams in wildlife conservation This is unfortunate, as a slightly greater emphasis on the human dimensions of reintroduction would be to the benefit of both ecological and human communities. This section could include a more detailed argument regarding why ‘types of leadership’ or ‘styles of management’ are likely to be so important to reintroduction success
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