Hopeful insights from wildlife recoveries in Canada

Facing the global biodiversity crisis, conservation practitioners and decision-makers seek to catalyze wildlife recoveries in their region. Here we examined social-ecological attributes related to threatened species recovery in Canada. First, we used a retrospective approach to compare the trajectories of the original species assessed by Canada's species-at-risk committee and found that only eight of 36 species now have decreased extinction risk relative to the past. There were no significant differences in human or financial capacity provided for recovery across species doing better, the same, or worse; the only significant difference was whether the primary cause of decline was alleviated or not. Second, when looking at species assessed at least twice between 2000 and 2019 we found that only eight of 422 (1.9%) experienced both increasing abundance and decreasing extinction risk. The defining characteristic of successful recoveries was first alleviating the original cause of decline, which was most often accomplished through strong regulatory intervention. Once declines were halted, practical interventions were highly species-specific. It is instructive to learn from conservation successes to scale resources appropriately and our results emphasize the importance of threat-specific intervention as a fundamental precursor to the successful restoration of biodiversity in Canada.