Using Fitness Surfaces to Better Link Conservation Breeding Programmes With Wild Population Recovery

Fitness surfaces offer a valuable tool for bridging the gap between captive breeding programmes and wild populations. By quantifying the relationship between phenotypes and reproductive success in captive and wild settings, fitness surfaces can help identify the fitness consequences of phenotypic change in either environment. Measuring fitness surfaces in captive and wild populations from the same species would help us to predict the success of reintroduction efforts and help inform the selection of release candidates. Overall, the inclusion of fitness surface estimates into conservation breeding programmes increases the effectiveness of reintroduction efforts and should improve our understanding of evolution at the interface of human-managed and wild populations. Beyond conservation breeding, fitness surfaces may have applications for at-risk species such as predicting outcomes in range expansions, translocation or under changing environmental conditions.