Yet for species so perilously close to full-on extinction, Smith said, they receive surprisingly little attention. “It’s a strange liminal space: disappeared from the wild, yet not entirely extinct,” write Donal Smith, a postdoctoral researcher at the Zoological Society of London, and Sarah Elizabeth Dalrymple, senior lecturer in conservation ecology at Liverpool John Moores University. Species are classified as “extinct in the wild” when they’re known to survive only in cultivation, in captivity, or as a naturalized population far from their natural range. Fifty-four bison remained in captivity, and from this small group a new population was born, with several thousand bison now roaming the ranges of Europe again. But when the last free-roaming individual was shot, that wasn’t the end of the story for the species. Hundreds of thousands of European bison once grazed the grassy slopes from Spain to Ukraine - until they gradually went extinct in the wild by 1927. The study highlights the challenges associated with maintaining genetic diversity in captivity and the need for more support of as well as greater coordination and communication among conservation institutions. On the flip side, 12 of these species have been successfully reintroduced, brought back from the brink of extinction. The researchers found that out of the 95 species classified as extinct in the wild since 1950, 11 have gone extinct since the 1990s.The researchers found that 33 animals and 39 plants have no wild population remaining, and at least 15 of these animals are down to fewer than 500 individuals.A study published in the journal Science highlights that “extinct in the wild” species, those that cling on in captivity or as part of conservation efforts outside their natural habitat, are at serious risk of disappearing entirely.
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