WCS Institute

© Sofia Redford

Mission: Amplifying Conservation Knowledge 

The Wildlife Conservation Society has the unique position among conservation organizations of running global field projects and five New York City living collections. Over the past century, WCS has grown and diversified to include four zoos and an aquarium and over 100 field conservation projects on four continents, as well as local and international education programs and a growing wildlife health center. Each part of WCS makes exemplary accomplishments toward the WCS mission of conserving wildlife and wild lands. To amplify this dispersed conservation knowledge, the WCS Institute was established in 2002 as an internal “think tank” for the organization, spanning all of its departments. The Institute draws on WCS’ wide range of staff expertise and geographic scope to identify areas where an exchange of ideas and experience can deepen our understanding of conservation issues. The Institute also disseminates WCS’ conservation work via papers and workshops, adding value to WCS’ discoveries and experience by sharing them with partner organizations, policy-makers, and the public. Each year, the Institute takes on a particular set of emerging issues that potentially challenge WCS’ mission or provide opportunities for WCS to further conservation effectiveness. Through this multi-stakeholder cross-pollination, the Institute helps bolster communication between WCS and the larger conservation community, raise public awareness on wildlife conservation issues and thereby help deliver on WCS’ mission.

State of the Wild
State of the Wild: A Global Portrait of Wildlife, Wildlands, and Oceans is a series published biennially by the WCS Institute in collaboration with Island Press to bring insightful and timely analysis of conservation issues into the public forum. It includes essays on emerging issues in conservation, regional conservation news, and innovative approaches to conservation challenges. The series aims to inform and inspire conservationists, educators and policy makers. The first edition, published in 2006, includes a special section on hunting and wildlife trade. The second volume, set for release in early 2008, will contain a special section on emerging wildlife health and disease issues. Click here for more information about this evocative series.

American Bison Society

© Julie Larsen Maher/WCS

 
In 2005, WCS reinitiated the American Bison Society (ABS), which was inspired by WCS’ first director William Hornaday in 1905, after he determined that alarmingly few bison remained in North America. Hornaday’s surveys showed that fewer than 1,000 bison remained in the wild, their populations ravaged from the approximately 30 million that once roamed the continent.  The ABS campaign saved bison from extinction by creating reserves and stocking them with bison from the Bronx Zoo. The revitalized American Bison Society will work with partners to ensure the future of bison and their ecological role in natural ecosystems.

In October 2006, WCS, along with co-hosts World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy, held a meeting on “The Ecological Future of the North American Bison.” The conference brought together representatives from a broad array of organizations interested in bison and bison landscapes to consider the future of ecologically meaningful bison populations across their range: grasslands, prairies, southwestern semi-deserts, and northern steppes. Click here to download a WCS working paper summarizing the presentations given and discussions held at the bison conference.

Futures Group
In the fall of 2004, WCS President Steven E. Sanderson asked a small number of staff to help launch a Futures Group that would give WCS and its communities guidance on long-term global scenarios that might influence WCS’ mission. The Futures Group considers the organizational adaptability and functionality of all WCS sectors, including animal health and well-being, curatorial capacity, wildlife management, and field conservation. The goal of the group addresses WCS' desire to be an organization under outstanding management and to build on its position as a New York City cultural institution with a history and trajectory and as a public policy stakeholder worldwide.

The Futures Group's work allows a rotating set of WCS leaders to step away from the day-to-day challenges of management and contemplate future potential contexts in which the institution might exist. The goal is to try to plan for future global scenarios, which, while they have present-day drivers, actually can not be predicted, and to do so by taking into account the most critical variables that could affect WCS’ mission. This long-term, creative thinking allows staff to question the assumptions they use to manage their daily work and to envision future constraints and opportunities for which WCS can prepare itself.

In 2007 the Futures Group concluded a one-year formal scenario planning exercise, completed through a partnership with the independent research and consulting firm Bio-era. The purpose of this process was to enable WCS managers to see and map “the road ahead.” The formal scenario planning process identified important, relevant emerging realities and trends with the potential to significantly impact WCS in coming years, and built a framework that can be used to track, analyze, plan for, and respond to significant developments as they unfold. Read all about this exercise in the Futures of the Wild report.

Initiatives:


Karukinka
Karukinka is a protected area of 680,000 acres (1,062 square miles) on southern Patagonia’s island of Tierra del Fuego in Chile. In the 1990s, an American firm failed in its attempts to establish a sustainable logging operation focused on the island’s lenga forests, a kind of Southern beech tree. Goldman Sachs, a global investment banking firm, acquired the loans and land for the logging project and donated the property to the Wildlife Conservation Society in 2004. Goldman Sachs has been exemplary in this private-public conservation initiative, helping cover costs during the reserve's first three years and working with WCS to establish a fund for the reserve's future protection. The property, named Karukinka after the now-extinct Selk’nam people who inhabited this region of Tierra del Fuego, is managed by WCS as a private reserve.

The WCS Institute was instrumental in working with the WCS Latin America Program to establish this bountiful reserve of sub-Antarctic woodlands, peat bogs, wind-swept steppes, and snow-covered mountain ranges rich in plant and animal species, including guanaco, Culpeo fox, Magellanic woodpecker, and endemic plants. In an effort to restore Karukinka’s diverse ecosystem, WCS is currently working to contain Canadian beavers, which were first introduced to Argentina in the 1920s for fur farming but have since overpopulated both Argentina and Chile, changing river courses and damaging trees. In addition, WCS is planning sustainable development activities, including ecotourism, to support conservation objectives and provide benefits to local communities. This will be done in consultation with Chilean universities, non-governmental organizations, government officials, and local landowners.

For more information, please visit www.enjoy-patagonia.org and http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5601554.

Species Strategy
The WCS Institute connects and integrates the diverse parts of WCS through the joint analysis of conservation trends and issues, and in planning cross-WCS initiatives for conservation. Recently, the Institute began a formal process to develop a strategic approach that integrates the Society's species initiatives. Species conservation has been a priority for WCS from its inception over 100 years ago and is central to the organization’s mission today. The founding of the New York Zoological Society in 1897 had as one of its primary motives the need to address concerns about “extinction and diminishment” of such species as fur seals, herons, egrets, and migratory birds. The International Programs’ recently drafted Global Conservation Strategy 2007-2016 continues this legacy by recognizing that one of the key tools to successfully conserving biodiversity rests on saving species.
 
The Wildlife Conservation Society boasts the longest and richest history of species-oriented field research of any international NGO, and also is caretaker of America’s largest complex of urban zoos that maintain, breed and exhibit species. Although other organizations have various interests in species conservation, none are focused on conserving species at large geographic scales, none have WCS’ vast network of conservation projects with the ability to synthesize work at regional and global scales, and none can draw on the combined skills of WCS’ International Conservation Programs, Living Institutions, Wildlife Health Sciences Division, Exhibition and Graphic Arts Department, and Education Division.
 
Species conservation requires persistent efforts and sustained investments. As a result, WCS staff will always find themselves confronted with limited resources and time. These limitations require that WCS be wise in its investments. With thoughtful guidelines that provide structure and reason to WCS’ species conservation activities, the organization hopes to avoid ad hoc species conservation in which each individual species crisis is addressed as it occurs and be able to clearly articulate the Society’s goals among its staff, partners and donors.

Conservation and the Human Condition
Poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation are basic social objectives that form part of the policy agendas of international agencies and modern states. Governments, conservation NGOs, and other donors have contributed a significant amount of funding to development interventions that aim to achieve both of these objectives simultaneously. Measuring the success of such a complex task is difficult, however, and limited attention to the contexts in which it may be possible to achieve both goals often results in poor guides for policy makers. Through a set of activities including participation in international meetings, production of working papers that collect current working knowledge on the subject, and involvement in the MacArthur-funded ACSC (Advancing Conservation in a Social Context), the Institute continues to employ WCS’ expertise in field conservation and social sciences to inform this important global priority. To read more about this issue, see Agrawal, Arun and Kent Redford. (2006) Poverty, development, and biodiversity conservation: Shooting in the dark? WCS Working Paper No. 26.

White Oak Meetings
The Institute identifies and responds to key social, conservation, and political issues that affect WCS’ work. As part of this effort, the Institute has collaborated with the White Oak Conservation Center of Gilman International Conservation to hold a set of meetings bringing together WCS staff and selected outside experts to work on resolving important topical issues facing the institution. These meetings have focused on the following themes:

WCS Working Paper Series 

The WCS Working Paper Series, produced through the WCS Institute, is designed to share with the conservation and development communities in a timely fashion information from the various settings where WCS works. These Papers address issues that are of immediate importance to helping conserve wildlife and wildlands either through offering new data or analyses relevant to specific conservation settings, or through offering new methods, approaches, or perspectives on rapidly evolving conservation issues. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in the Papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

One-WCS Species Conservation Grant Program
The Institute’s One-WCS Species Conservation Grant Program awards grants to WCS research teams that pair experts from the living collections and international field conservation programs. The grants promote cross-fertilization of knowledge between these two parts of the institution in order to strengthen WCS’ understanding of animals and their ecology, and to further WCS’ expertise in animal management and conservation. Following is a list of the most recent grants awarded:

2005-2006

• Andres Novaro & Pat Thomas -- Combining resources of WCS Living Institutions & International Programs for the conservation of guanacos in Patagonia
  
  
  2004-2005
  
• Colleen McCann, Roger Fotso, & Jacqui Sunderland-Groves -- A Collaborative Program for WCS' Living Institution and International Conservation for Endangered Primates at the Limbe Wildlife Center, Cameroon
  
• William J. McShea & David Powell -- The effect of carnivore and herbivore lures on detection of herbivores with remote-detection cameras
  
• Rosie Woodroffe, Patrick Thomas, & Bonnie Raphael -- Tools for the conservation of African wild dogs: developing vaccination protocols for field use
  
• Andrew Noss, Nancy Clum, & Robin Bjork -- Focus species: Amazona aestiva
  
• Christine Sheppard & Colin Poole -- Distribution, Breeding Behavior and Success of Lesser Adjutant Storks in Cambodia
  
• Michale Glennon & Don Moore -- Into the Woods with Wood Turtles
  

This page was last updated on 09-18-2007.