A million species are under the threat of extinction, scientists say.
Since the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, 11 species on that list have been declared extinct in the United States.
One tool being used to combat the extinction crisis is species reintroduction — the process of re-establishing a species population in an area they’ve been driven out of.
Reintroduction has been successful in the U.S. before, with a variety of species. Black-footed ferrets were once among the rarest mammals in the world, with only 18 in existence in 1987. Decades of reintroduction later, about a thousand black-footed ferrets are in the wild today.
But how are decisions around reintroduction made? We’ll check in on the battle over a gray wolf release program in Colorado, and answer your reintroduction questions as part of our weeklong biodiversity series — SOS: Save Our Species.
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