Ex-situ Conservation

The goal of this website is to inform you and provide a new perspective on the topic of biodiversity and conservation of wildlife.

Word ex-situ comes from Latin and translates to off-site, and means that individuals of targeted endangered species are bred in captivity, with the intention of future reintroduction into their natural habitat. Captivity greatly affects animals, so the way we take care of them must be cautious, to minimize negative effects.

Currently the earth is undergoing extinction of species on vary big scale. It is natural process for certain amount of species to go extinct. However, in the history of the earth, some events occurred when rate of species going extinct was far greater than usually.

We call those event mass extinctions. This term describes events when more than 75% of species disappear from the earth in relatively short time. Many studies lead to believe that earth is undergoing next mass extinction now. As opposed to previous extinction events which were caused by natural factors like eruption of super volcano current situation is caused by humans, and therefore we have obligation to solve this problem. Disappearance of species results in loss of biodiversity.

Biodiversity (biological diversity) describes richness of life forms. Extinction of species will not only do harm to them, loss of biodiversity will impact human as well. Well-functioning ecosystem provides us with ecosystem services, for example ocean abundant in many species of fish and other life forms provides us with food. Bees and other insects pollinate our crops. Trees store carbon, reducing CO2 in the atmosphere.

We simply can’t survive without nature, therefore we need to stop currently ongoing extinction trend, and ex-situ approach is one of the method used for this reason. It is especially important when population of species is rapidly declining, and action of the field would not be sufficient to save it.