Review of Endangered Species Recovery Plans

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The Society for Conservation Biology, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service funded a national study of recovery plans that enlisted researchers from 18 universities.  The purpose of the study was to conduct a systematic and quantitative review of recovery plans for 181 species  to identify aspects of recovery plans that might be improved with respect to the application of science to species conservation. Our contributions to this study were to evaluate the extent to which monitoring was proposed and implemented and to examine the types of threats facing species and the degree to which threats were understood and addressed. The results of these studies were published as part of an Invited Feature in Ecological Applications (PDF, PDF).