Influence of institutional attributes on fulfillment of transfer and breeding recommendations in zoos and aquariums

Compliance with Breeding and Transfer Plan (BTP) recommendations is important to promote long‐term viability and meet the management goals of the Association of Zoos and Aquarium Species Survival Plans (SSPs®). However, individual institutions may fulfill recommendations at different rates, potentially compromising management efforts. We examined institution‐level fulfillment rates of BTP recommendations (i.e, “Hold,” “Send To,” “Breed With,” and “Do Not Breed”), and how rates differ based on institutional attributes related to resource levels, geographic location and climate, involvement in population management, and the SSPs in which institutions participated using conditional random forests and generalized linear mixed models. We analyzed 52,182 recommendations from 375 SSPs issued to 170 institutions in BTPs published from 2012 to 2019. Contrary to predictions, our results did not reveal large differences in fulfillment rates based on resources, geographic location, or climate variables at the institution level. We found modest patterns indicating that recommendation fulfillment for Hold and Do Not Breed recommendations in mammals was lower with longer interplanning periods, while fulfillment of Hold recommendations in birds increased with the average experience of individuals in SSP leadership roles. For herptiles, fulfillment of Send To recommendations was moderately higher in institutions with species spread across more herptile taxonomic advisory groups (the management unit for related species). Although our results suggest that overarching institutional factors do not have a strong influence on fulfillment rates at the scale of our study, more focused research within a specific temporal window, taxa, or suite of SSPs may reveal more informative patterns for population management.