Conference Agenda

Conservation translocations have been widely used in Europe to reverse, slow down or counterbalance the effects of population extinction of natural populations. However, valuable insights from case studies often remain unpublished or lack standardised results, which prevents effective comparisons and hampers both the assessment of the relevance of translocations and the appropriateness of their methodology. To address this gap, the TransLoc database has been under development since 2013, focusing on compiling and standardising data related to plant, lichen, and animal translocations in Europe and the Mediterranean (Western Palearctic). The database aims to centralise scattered information from scientific and grey literature, as well as non-computerized field notebooks, making it accessible to researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders. Using this database, we explore taxonomic and phylogenetic biases (compared with general floras) in plant translocations across four European countries. Focusing on angiosperms, our analysis reveals biases towards specific plant groups, with certain orders over-represented across countries. Additionally, translocated plant species exhibit higher-than-expected phylogenetic diversity in Spain, France, and Switzerland, and greater evolutionary distinctiveness in Spain and France. This research underscores the importance of TransLoc in addressing knowledge gaps and promoting informed decision-making in conservation translocations.

The European research project Transloc aims to document, quantify and analyse translocation efforts and their effectiveness for flora and fauna conservation, as well as their socio-economic benefits or negative impacts. As part of the social component of this research project, the experts of Biotope, a French ecology consultancy, have developed a cooperative serious game to help practitioners explore and anticipate the main principles, limits, difficulties and success factors of a conservation translocation project. During a game session (2-3 hours), players collaborate and explore the multiple challenges of translocation projects, within a limited budget and timeframe. They build a translocation project for a target species, implement actions (restoration, protection, stakeholder engagement, research, monitoring, release of individuals, etc.) and have to deal with random events (extreme weather events for instance). Several test sessions have been carried out with conservation researchers and have shown that the serious game works well and generates rich discussions. It will be now used to facilitate discussions among translocation practitioners on the success factors, levers and obstacles to translocation projects, and if relevant to contribute to the design process of new translocation projects.

How to effectively assess the success in conservation translocations is still unclear. However, taking into account relevant success indicators during the different phases of a population establishment and growth are key to ensure its long-term viability. This underlines the need to develop a clear definition of success criteria, applicable to the widest range of species and relevant to life histories, management techniques, environmental conditions and conservation contexts. We summarized the currently used success criteria in a review and looked for variation between different biological and environmental factors. We developed recommendations to be embedded in a unified framework for success assessment centered on population viability and accounting for the transient dynamics of any translocation. We also investigated further correlations of success and failure at the community and ecosystem level in past translocations to develop a more comprehensive view of translocation success for the purpose of conservation and restoration. This allowed us to provide new indications to increase the efficacy of translocations.

Conservation translocations are often locally designed actions involving various actors, constraints and motivations. In addition, these actions generally occur in the context of high impacts of human activities and climate change threats. The release sites are then often spatially restricted, but their locations can have profound consequences on the persistence of the translocated populations when considering future conditions of climate and land use. In this context, we examined two specific questions to better understand the relevance of translocation sites. We first assessed how the current and future climate conditions match in translocated sites, considering the climate tolerance of the focal species (plants, birds, and mammals). This information provided an overview of how the effects of climate change threaten translocation programs. We then assessed if and how a collection of focal species (mammals) can disperse through the landscapes over time and reach areas with necessary conditions to prevail, accounting for land use conversion, climate change, and anthropogenic barriers such as roads and railways. Our results suggest that range shift is species-specific and mostly related to habitat specialization and dispersal capacity traits. We discuss how translocation programs should incorporate information on global change effects to foster the efficiency and success of conservation.