Ex situ conservation is a process of protecting an endangered species, variety, or breed of plant or animal outside its natural habitat. It is a type of conservation where threatened species are taken out of their natural habitat to be stored or looked after elsewhere. Ex situ conservation is used as a last resort or complementary to habitat restoration or in-situ strategies. The key features of ex situ conservation are:
-
Facilities: Botanical gardens, zoos, and aquariums are the most conventional methods of ex situ conservation. These facilities provide not only housing and care for specimens of endangered species but also have an educational value.
-
Gene banks: Agricultural biodiversity is also conserved in ex situ collections. This is primarily in the form of gene banks where samples are stored to conserve the genetic resources of major crop plants and their wild relatives.
-
Artificial selection: Species maintained ex situ for multiple generations may undergo artificial selection, as they are not under the same selection pressures as wild populations.
Ex situ conservation is rarely enough to save a species from extinction and is to be used as a last resort or as a supplement to in situ conservation because it cannot recreate the habitat as a whole. Examples of ex-situ conservation of biodiversity include aquariums, botanical gardens, cryopreservation, DNA banks, and zoos.
