Monitoring wildlife health is essential for conservation and management, wildlife and livestock welfare, and public health in a One Health framework. Yet, wildlife health monitoring often requires long‐term fieldwork and intensive sampling, which can be costly or logistically challenging, especially for remote, rare, or elusive populations. To address these challenges, we evaluated the feasibility and utility of integrating ca...

Nature is an opaque concept. Consequently, the term biodiversity conservation has replaced nature conservation in most conservation contexts. We review the conceptual indeterminacies that plague the terms nature and natural but then show that comparable difficulties plague biodiversity . Then, we provide a new theory that sorts out the respective normative roles of naturalness and biodiversity within the ecocentric–intrinsic s...

The concept of naturalness in biodiversity conservation remains polysemic, hampering decision‐making. Although some conservationists claim ecosystem naturalness should be primarily determined by composition (integrity), others argue it should be determined by the extent of freedom from anthropogenic influence (autonomy). Problems arise when deciding how to treat affected ecosystems. Although the integrity school promotes bench...

Article impact statement : Normative scientists must be trained in current thinking of the philosophy that underlies their fields, an issue not fully realized in conservation.

Effective population size, a central concept in conservation biology, is now routinely estimated from genetic surveys and can also be theoretically predicted from demographic, life‐history, and mating‐system data. By evaluating the consistency of theoretical predictions with empirically estimated effective size, insights can be gained regarding life‐history characteristics and the relative impact of different life‐history trai...

The role of behavioral ecology in improving wildlife conservation and management has been the subject of much recent debate. We sought to answer 2 foundational questions about the current use of behavioral knowledge in conservation: To what extent is behavioral knowledge used in wildlife conservation and management, and how does the use of animal behavior differ among conservation fields in both frequency and types of use? We...

Interference competition may lead to a tragedy of the commons in which individuals driven by self‐interest reduce the fitness of the entire group. We investigated this hypothesis in Allenby's gerbils, Gerbillus andersoni allenbyi , by comparing foraging behaviors of single vs. pairs of gerbils. We recorded strong interference competition within the foraging pairs. Competition reduced the amount of time the gerbils spent foragi...

Releasing animals in more than one location may increase or decrease the probability of success of a reintroduction project, yet the question of how many release sites to use has received little attention. We used empirical data from the reintroduction program of the Persian fallow deer (Dama mesopotamica) (Galilee region in northern Israel) in an individual‐based spatially explicit simulation model to assess the effects of re...

Anthropogenic habitat perturbation is a major cause of population decline. A standard practice managers use to protect populations is to leave portions of natural habitat intact. We describe a case study in which, despite the use of this practice, the critically endangered lizard Acanthodactylus beershebensis was locally extirpated from both manipulated and natural patches within a mosaic landscape of an afforestation project....

Reintroductions often rely on captive‐raised, naïve animals that have not been exposed to the various threats present in natural environments. Wild animals entering new areas are timid and invest much time and effort in antipredator behavior. On the other hand, captive animals reared in predator‐free conditions and in close proximity to humans may initially lack this tendency, but can reacquire some antipredator behavior over...

Theory proposes that increased environmental stochasticity negatively impacts population viability. Thus, in addition to the directional changes predicted for weather parameters under global climate change (GCC), the increase in variance of these parameters may also have a negative effect on biodiversity. As a case study, we assessed the impact of interannual variance in precipitation on the viability of an Asiatic wild ass (...

Corridors are usually perceived as clearly visible, linear landscape elements embedded in a hostile environment that connect two or more larger blocks of habitat. Animal response to certain aspects of landscape heterogeneity, however, can channel their movements into specific routes that may appear similar to their surroundings. These routes can be described as “virtual corridors” (VCs). Here we contribute to the foundation of...

Because most reintroduced species are rare, data on their dynamics are scarce. Consequently, reintroduction programs often rely on data from other species or captive populations to project the performance of the reintroduced population in the wild. We compared the reproductive success and survival of a Persian fallow deer ( Dama mesopotamica ) population reintroduced in Israel over the first 5 years of the project with the sur...