Inbreeding and demography interact to impact the recovery of a bottlenecked crested ibis population.

Abstract

Biodiversity loss driven by climate change and human activities poses a critical global challenge. Population restoration and reintroduction programs are essential for mitigating this threat to endangered species, yet their outcomes often remain unpredictable due to poorly understood success factors, such as the inevitable inbreeding during bottleneck events. The conservation programme of the crested ibis (Nipponia nippon) marks a successful example where the population rose from just seven individuals to over 9000 in the past four decades. By developing an individual-based model that simulates the restoration process and incorporates species-specific demography and inbreeding data, we conclude that this successful restoration is largely deterministic, as our results closely mirror empirical recovery time and population-level inbreeding coefficients. To establish general guidelines for reintroduction programs, we compare how inbreeding depression influences the recovery success of two reintroduction strategies involving small founder populations. Our simulations reveal that the 'firework' approach (one-source translocations) outperforms the 'sequential' (serial translocations) approach in restoration effectiveness. Furthermore, by expanding analyses over a broad demographic space, we demonstrate that the net effect of inbreeding varies with species-specific demography and highlight the importance of considering their interaction when interpreting conservation outcomes and designing future reintroduction programs.