We want to thank the 100 plus conservationists attending the meeting.
It was an immense honor spending those days with you in Valencia!

Click here to watch the entire sessions that took place during the meeting.

Highly experienced reintroduction practitioners (i.e. reintroduction maestros) from each continent will engage in a two-days conversation to reflect on their projects and their hard-won lessons in order to identify the key aspects associated to effective wildlife conservation translocation programs.

This will spark conversations in an audience composed of other reintroductions practitioners who will attend the sessions and exchange ideas and contacts with colleagues from other countries.

• To identify and communicate best practices in wildlife conservation translocation programs from different continents and conservation cultures.
• To promote the exchange of practical knowledge and the establishment of professional networks among reintroduction and rewilding practitioners from different continents.

United Nations has declared this decade as the decade of Ecological Restoration. During the next years we are going to witness a massive effort to restore damaged ecosystems all over the World. Conservation translocations and reintroduction of wildlife will be a key approach within this context. However, such programs are extremely complex because they require the proper management of scientific, technical, social, political and organizational aspects. In fact, many highly needed reintroduction efforts fail at their initial phases because those in charge are not able to manage all these aspects properly, typically focusing on the first two ones. Planning is a key aspect of a successful translocation and reintroduction process. Experience gained shows that there is fundamental aspects that are generic but for a project to be successful local knowledge and flexibility to adapt as challenges appear — harnessing experience — is key to ensuring responsible and best practice outcomes.

The good news is that during the last decades the conservation translocation and rewilding community has built a vast practical knowledge about how to manage effective reintroduction programs. Much of this knowledge is stored within the heads of highly experienced conservation translocation practitioners who have been leading successful programs in different continents for several decades. These practitioners represent distinct “reintroduction cultures” that have developed a set of best practices adapted to local or regional ecological and social conditions. Asking the right questions will allow us to turn best practice examples into best process approaches, leading towards significant improvement in many ongoing and future reintroduction programs.