As biodiversity loss accelerates and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework calls for urgent, evidence-based conservation action, wildlife biobanking has an increasingly important role to play in supporting species recovery, conservation breeding, and long-term genetic resource management.
Although an important strategic framework now exists, there remains limited consolidated empirical data on current global practice, infrastructure capacity, implementation constraints, and regional disparities, particularly across lower-income regions and underrepresented taxa.
A multi-institutional group of collaborators has therefore been convened to undertake a structured global survey titled “Global Wildlife Biobanking Gap Analysis: Practices, Capacity, Risks and Opportunities.” The aim is to generate an independent, evidence-based overview of wildlife biobanking activity across taxa, regions, and institution types, and to identify practical capacity gaps and priority needs that may inform future coordination, training, policy development, and international collaboration. Wildlife biobanking, encompassing the preservation of biological materials such as plants, seeds, sperm, eggs, embryos, tissues, DNA, and cell lines, supports assisted reproduction, genetic rescue, disease research, and reference collections across zoos, museums, and research institutions worldwide. The survey has already received support from a number of leading global organisations.
Participation
The survey includes two participation pathways to reflect the diversity of experience across the wildlife conservation community:
1. For participants directly involved in wildlife biobanking, including those managing, operating, or contributing to biobank collections, questions focus on current practices, infrastructure, specimen holdings, and access.
2. For participants not directly engaged in biobanking, including those working in wildlife conservation, research, collection management, or related fields who are aware of, collaborate with, use, may benefit from, or are interested in understanding biobanking and its potential future role in conservation. These questions focus on awareness, needs, barriers, and perspectives on future development.
Participation is voluntary, responses are anonymous and reported only in aggregated form, and the survey takes approximately 20 – 40 minutes to complete, depending on the level of detail each respondent is able to provide, particularly regarding collection inventory, the accessibility of institutional records, and any legal or ownership restrictions that may apply to stored material. Most questions are multiple choice, and recent respondents have found it takes around 20–35 minutes to complete. The survey will remain open until 31 October 2026.