Fitness surfaces can link conservation programs to the populations they support and improve our ability to augment populations in a changing environment

Fitness surfaces offer a valuable tool for bridging the gap between captive breeding programs and wild populations. By quantifying the relationship between individual phenotypes for a trait and their reproductive success in captive and wild settings, fitness surfaces can help identify the impacts of captive selection and phenotypic plasticity. Measuring fitness surfaces in captive and wild populations would allow us to predict the success of reintroduction efforts and help inform the selection of release candidates. Overall, the inclusion of fitness surface estimates into conservation breeding programs increases the effectiveness of reintroduction efforts and should help improve our understanding of evolution at the interface of human management and wildlife populations.