Ex situ conservation of the Bengal florican 913
not have the resources to do this at the scale that is necessary within the time available, and success is at least partially de- pendent on factors outside our control, such as the attitudes of farmers, market forces and government policy. In con- trast, the counterfactual future scenario used by Dolman et al. (2015) imagined a situation where in situ conservation was considerably more successful than has eventuated, al- though what was envisaged may have been possible at the time.
We aimed to use the IUCN guidelines (including model
outputs and a decision tree) to support local stakeholders to make an informed, unbiased decision about ex situ manage- ment of the Bengal florican, and having made that decision, to identify risks that needed to bemitigated to maximize the chance of success. We do not want the Bengal florican to join the list of taxa that have been lost for want of a deci- sion to evaluate ex situ conservation or initiate it in time (Woinarski et al., 2016). Demographic modelling indicates there is a reasonable chance that a captive population can be established and that in 20–30 years it should be large enough to consider reintroduction if habitat is avail- able and threats have been mitigated. We acknowledge that such a population is likely to be small and based on a limited number of founders, so failure is possible at every step. Our decision to attempt ex situ management of the
Bengal florican was made based on a thorough evaluation of risks and resources, informed by demographic modelling. Weconsidered both philosophical and practical issues using a decision tree. The process that we used is transparent and we hope that our decision tree will be helpful in other, simi- lar situations. We will continue to do everything possible to prevent the loss of remaining wild populations of the Bengal florican, but we acknowledge that, if not managed properly, taking eggs and adults from the wild mayaccelerate declines. With hindsight, we should have considered ex situ manage- ment in 2012, when there were a number of small unprotect- ed populations that had little chance of survival owing to financial and practical constraints on in situ conservation. Our results indicate that, with support for bustard husband- ry techniques, there remains a reasonable chance of estab- lishing a captive population. However, we anticipate that the Bengal florican may persist only in captivity for many years, and it may never be released in a situation that re- sembles its current wild state. We consider this is preferable to complete loss of the taxon, and captive or semi-wild in- dividuals may serve an educational purpose. We urge con- servation managers faced with rapidly declining species to evaluate comprehensively the potential role of ex situ man- agement, rule it out whenever there is the possibility of suc- cessful conservation of wild populations, or pursue it rapidly where not.
Acknowledgements We acknowledge the ongoing support of the Royal Government of Cambodia, in particular the General
Department for Administration of Nature Conservation and Pro- tection of the Ministry of Environment, and the Department of Wildlife and Biodiversity of the Forestry Administration, Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. We thank Dolman et al. (2015) for making the R code for their demographic model publicly available, and we encourage others to use it alongside the IUCN captive manage- ment guidelines (IUCN/SSC, 2014).We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers, whose comments improved this article significantly. SPM is a recipient of a Prestigious International Research Tuition Scholarship at Charles Darwin University. This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, or commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Author contributions Study design, modelling, writing: SPM; revi- sion, editing: CH, MM, PF, PS, VS, STG.
Conflicts of interest None.
Ethical standards This research abided by the Oryx guidelines on ethical standards.
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Oryx, 2021, 55(6), 903–915 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605319001510
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