Standards for documenting and monitoring plant reintroductions

Matthew Albrecht, Missouri Botanical Garden

Monitoring is a central component of reintroduction programs, but often receives less attention from practitioners than the preparation or implementation phases of a project. A well-designed monitoring program can detect changes in the environment over time, identify new threats that emerge at the reintroduction site, determine drivers of growth rates in reintroduced populations, and inform adaptive management. This presentation highlights the ten key components of a well-designed monitoring program based on the CPC’s Best Plant Conservation Practices.  Topics discussed includes monitoring objectives and designs for short- and long-lived plant species, threat detection, evaluating fecundity and dispersal, comparisons with wild reference populations, types of data analyses, and best-practices for data management and sharing.