Predicting harvest impact and establishment success when translocating highly mobile and endangered species

Harvesting individuals for translocations can negatively impact source populations, a critical challenge for species reduced to small populations. Consequently, translocation cohorts often remain small, reducing the establishment probability at the destination. Balancing the potential benefits and risks of such translocations is further complicated by philopatry and natural metapopulation dynamics if the target species is highly mobile. These challenges highlight the importance of translocation feasibility assessments, but such assessments often remain qualitative to date. The critically endangered Kuaka (Whenua Hou Diving Petrel; Pelecanoides whenuahouensis) is a philopatric, highly mobile seabird that could benefit from conservation translocations, but only one small population remains. Through expert elicitations with a user-friendly Shiny app, we developed a novel metapopulation extension to an integrated population model fitted to long-term data, allowing us to simultaneously proje...