Defining reintroduction success using IUCN criteria for threatened species: a demographic assessment

Despite recent efforts to develop the science of reintroduction biology, there is still no general and broadly accepted definition of reintroduction success. We investigate this issue based on the postulates (1) that successful reintroduction programs should produce viable populations and (2) that reliable assessments of ultimate success require that populations have reached their regulation phase. We assessed if the viability of these reintroduced populations could be evaluated using the same criteria as for remnant populations, such as the Internation Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List criteria. Using modeling, we projected the viabilities of theoretical populations with various life history and environmental characteristics and we tested whether population sizes (criterion D of the IUCN) and other potential predictors are relevant proxies of the risk of extinction (criterion E of the IUCN) in the case of remnant populations with an unknown past history and in the case of reintroduced populations that have reached their carrying capacity. We found that, as for remnant populations, population size can be used as a relevant indicator (although subject to considerable uncertainty) of the viability of reintroduced populations. However, the results demonstrate the importance of the reintroduction failure filter, that is, the fact that the reintroduced populations that have successfully reached their carrying capacity are those with the highest and more stable growth rates, especially if populations have been reintroduced with a few individuals. As a consequence, the general relationship between the current size of a population and its projected viability will, most likely, differ considerably between remnant and reintroduced populations. Overall, our results demonstrate that there are no theoretical limitations on the application of some of the criteria widely used for remnant populations to define reintroduction success, although these criteria are very conservative for reintroduced populations and might be rescaled to account for the demographic filter that early extinction constitutes for these populations. Read the Commentaries on this Feature Paper: ; ; and the Response from the authors: