Ex-Situ Conservation

Ex-situ conservation is the conservation of selected rare plants and animals in locations outside their natural homes, and the chapter organises it into two broad approaches: offsite collections and gene banks. Offsite collections are live collections of both wild and domesticated species maintained in botanical gardens, zoological parks, wildlife safari parks and arboreta (gardens dedicated to trees and shrubs), where the organisms are carefully maintained specifically to support captive breeding programmes; as a direct result, many species that are already extinct in the wild continue to survive and be maintained within zoological parks, and as captive-bred numbers build up, individuals are progressively released back into the wild — an approach that has concretely helped save both the Indian crocodile and the Gangetic dolphin from extinction. Gene banks, the second approach, are a type of biorepository dedicated to preserving genetic material: seeds representing different genetic strains of commercially important plants can be stored for long periods in seed banks, while the gametes of threatened species can be kept viable and fertile over long periods using cryopreservation techniques. The chapter is candid about the limits of this approach, however — it is simply not economically feasible to conserve every unit of biological wealth and every ecosystem on Ear …