UC Berkeley

To combat declines in biodiversity, conservationists are increasingly looking to restore wildlife populations through the reintroduction of select species, the establishment of protected areas, and the use of human-wildlife conflict mitigation tools. A primary objective of wildlife restoration efforts is to reestablish trophic interactions crucial for the function and structure of ecosystems. However, recovering wildlife populations are often returning to novel ecosystems with altered environments and new species compositions. These novel ecosystems may then complicate the outcomes of wildlife restoration efforts. In Chapter 1, I provide a brief introduction to key themes of wildlife restoration in novel ecosystems. In Chapter 2, I evaluate the outcomes of wildlife translocations around the world. Specifically, I evaluate whether the inclusion of human dimensions in the planning and execution of a translocation improves success. Next, for my final two chapters, I zoom in to Argentine Patagonia to better understand how a novel environment impacts the outcomes of wildlife restoration. In Chapter 3, I assess how roads influence the habitat selection of the most widespread large herbivore in Patagonia, the guanaco. In addition to the creation of novel landscapes, habitat restoration in the region has led to a novel interaction between pumas and penguins. In Chapter 4, I test how this novel interaction between pumas and penguins impacts puma behavior and their population. Then building on these results, for Chapter 5, I examine the impacts of the puma-penguin interaction on guanacos, the primary prey for guanacos throughout Patagonia. Finally in Chapter 6, I close with some concluding remarks about wildlife restoration in novel ecosystems.