Havens are a pathway, not an endpoint, for species recovery: A response to Woinarski et al. (2023)

Conservation status assessments under the Australian Government's environmental legislation (the EPBC Act, 1999, henceforth ‘the Act’) are valuable for acknowledging management successes and de-listing species that have genuinely recovered in the wild. In keeping with this objective, Woinarski et al. (2023) argued that 12 Australian mammals no longer met the criteria for threatened status, based in part on their reintroductions into conservation-fenced ‘havens’. Our concern is that delisting species based on their haven populations could have unintended detrimental outcomes due to reduced protection of refugial populations.