Roger Sweeney, Director of Animal Management & Welfare, North Carolina Zoo

One of the ways North Carolina Zoo supports conservation work is using our staff expertise and resources to promote and contribute to the development of better evidence-based conservation planning, leading to more effective conservation action plans being developed for species of high conservation concern.  

The North Carolina Zoo has full-time conservation biologists on staff who are specialized in monitoring wild populations of animals and researching what threats they face in the wild. We also have a wealth of experience within our animal care staff who specialize in the husbandry care, welfare, and breeding of wild animals under human care. Zoo curators and their teams who manage zoo populations often have specialist knowledge that can allow them to play an important role in conservation planning. The knowledge gained from managing threatened species under human care in the Zoo provides more than just the opportunity to provide assurance populations, this work can provide important insights into the behavior, biology and environmental needs of these animals.

This knowledge gained from close contact with animals under human care can often be translated back into having the skills to implement conservation actions for the same species in the wild. Some examples include head-starting programs for species that experience a high mortality rate at an early stage of their lives, providing artificial nest sites for species that are highly dependent on a specific habitat that is disappearing, or nest protection for threatened species declining because of an invasive predator. Conservation action such as translocating animals to different sites across the range to improve genetic management, or to avoid the presence of an invasive predator are also more effective options because of the skills gained by our animal care staff working at the Zoo.

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North Carolina Zoo staff headstarting frogs in the Sandhills ares to help save a native species

We believe that effective conservation is often best achieved by integrating both field conservationists and zoo animal care specialists together into the conservation planning process so that all populations of an endangered species, both in their natural range and outside in populations managed under human care are considered together. Zoo curators with specialist knowledge are often members of IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature)  Species Survival Commission specialist groups, and can play a valuable role when participating in conservation planning workshops that are held within range countries that bring together local communities and organizations with conservation specialists in a way that is stakeholder inclusive and science-based. Known as the ‘One-Plan’ approach to conservation developed by the IUCN, this integrated approach produces one comprehensive conservation plan for the species to bridge the gap between wild and those being managed by zoos. The Zoo supports both the funding and development of species conservation planning workshops for endangered species in their home countries, and often contributes staff expertise and resources to these processes.

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Sulu hornbill, a critically endangered species one step away from extinction in the wild

For myself, I have been fortunate to have not only worked with endangered species managed by zoos for more than 30 years, but I have also had the opportunity to apply some of the knowledge gained into implementing conservation planning and actions for many of those species in the wild. Being a member of both the IUCN SSC Hornbill Specialist Group, and the IUCN SSC Conservation Planning Specialist Group, the conservation of Asian hornbills is an area that I have been focusing on, and North Carolina Zoo has allowed me to play a role in some important work for some of the world’s most critically endangered hornbills in the past year. I hope to describe two of these workshops in upcoming blogs, which were a highly impactful process of bringing together all sectors of the community that share the landscape and natural resources with these critically endangered species to be involved in planning for the future in a way that considers both wildlife and local people in a holistic partnership for conservation.

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Sweeney participating in species conservation planning workshops to help save Asian hornbills