Species conservation through partnership: Exploring the presence and activities of partners in species removed from Endangered Species Act listing process due to conservation efforts

Annabelle Stanley, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, Rebecca Epanchin-Neill, Resources for the Future and Gwenllian D. Iacona, Center for Biodiversity Outcomes, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ

Background/Question/Methods
Threatened species conservation often relies on the formation of partnerships between conservation organizations that contribute to the recovery process by providing resources, management, incentives and encouraging behavior or learning. Efficient recovery planning needs to be able to consider existing partnerships and know when to strategically develop new ones. One situation where partners are explicitly acknowledged, and thus can be studied, is when species are removed from the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to conservation efforts. While partnerships across the Endangered Species Act listed species may differ, focusing on species that avoid listing due to conservation offers an opportunity to explore coordinated conservation planning and is a first step towards understanding the formation and facilitation of partnerships. The goal of this study is to explore the presence and activities of partnerships between organizations that have been successful in removing or reducing threats for at-risk species. To do so, we create a dataset of conservation partners from publicly available recovery documents and management plans and use these data to: a) identify the organizations partnering with the US Fish and Wildlife Service b) explore features that could influence the number of partners for a species c) look for patterns in which organizations partner by using network analysis, and d) investigate the types of actions that different types of organizations work on.

Results/Conclusions
Findings indicate that the majority of partners work on one to two species and form partnerships with an average of 18.5 (SD ±19.2). Only the number of threats that a species faces was positively related to the number of partners engaged in the species’ conservation. However, partnering across different types of organizations and the number and category of actions for each type of organization did not follow a consistent pattern. Put together, our work characterizes the types of entities that work to preemptively conserve at-risk species that are pending ESA listing, their actions, and who they work with. Such information is important in species recovery and looks to further the field of systemic conservation planning.