Taylor, Gemma; (2019) Improving the Recovery Efforts of Threatened Species. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Reintroductions are becoming an increasingly popular tool for threatened species management and broader scale restoration projects. Reintroductions require a series of important decisions to be made from planning and implementation through to postrelease establishment and persistence of populations. Decision making in reintroduction is frequently impeded by high levels of uncertainty. Linguistic, epistemic and aleatory uncertainties often lead to a failure to meet project objectives. This has led to repeated calls for setting clear objectives and using these to focus monitoring in a way that allows applied science to support management. // Viewed in this way, applied science can naturally assist the decision making process. It is important to reduce only the uncertainties that will help inform the choice between two or more possible actions. These can be reduced through targeted monitoring and research. The failure of applied science to approach research in this way is one possible explanation for the ‘research –implementation gap’ that persists in conservation biology. Throughout this thesis I use decision analytic tools to evaluate and inform the discipline of reintroduction biology. Decision analytic tools are increasingly being utilised in diverse fields of resource management. The benefits for more formally incorporating decision science into conservation biology are obvious and repeatedly lauded, yet it remains unclear how much the approach is used to ensure applied science is truly informing management, particularly in the growing discipline of reintroduction biology. // Overall, my PhD intends to promote the application of formal decision tools to threatened species management and showcase how it can reduce uncertainty and support decision making specifically in reintroductions. In using the Regent Honeyeater recovery actions as a case study, I will evaluate whether management actions to recover the species are working, as well as highlighting areas where resources can be targeted to reduce the uncertainties that influence management decisions, rather than wasting it on those that are not relevant.

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