Wildlife Conservation Society

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The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is an American conservation foundation. It supports species protection projects worldwide. The WCS emerged as a conservation organization from the New York Zoological Society (NYZS) founded in 1895 as the New York Zoological Society , which was renamed WCS in 1993.

The society was founded in the Bronx Zoo , among others by the city planner of Greater New York Andrew H. Green (1820-1903), the zoologist and paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History and George Bird Grinnell , the founder of the Audubon Society .

The Bronx Zoo also includes the Central Park Zoo , the New York Aquarium , the Queens Zoo and the Prospect Park Zoo .

Areas of work and history

The organization supports local species protection projects worldwide. Above all, she uses modern techniques such as camera traps , telemetry and cyber tracking . WCS pays special attention to “global priority species”, ie species that are threatened with extinction, are important for humans or have high symbolic power (keystone species, priority species ). These include great apes (gorillas in the Congo), tigers in India, elephants and whales. Right at the beginning of the 20th century they did their best to save the American bison, which was almost extinct. The then director of the New York Zoological Park William Temple Hornaday undertook a national inventory of nature reserves worthy of protection at the end of the 19th century and was the initiator of the American Bison Society , founded in 1905 with the support of Theodore Roosevelt , the first protected areas (Wichita 1905) for the from 1901 in the Bronx farmed wild bison reached. William Beebe , curator for birds at the New York Zoological Garden and later known as a deep-sea researcher, expanded the activity to the tropics as director of a department of the society founded for this purpose, which he headed from 1922 until his retirement in 1948. Thereafter, the nature conservation campaign of the WCS under its leader Fairfield Osborn (1887-1969), the son of Henry Fairfield Osborn and first president of the WWF predecessor Conservation Foundation , expanded considerably worldwide (Africa, Indonesia). One of the field biologists supported by the WCS was George Schaller , who began researching gorillas in the Congo in the late 1950s. William G. Conway , who became the director of the Bronx Zoo in 1962 and WCS in 1992, pushed the program to develop zoos as the backbones of wildlife conservation. He also updated the zoo's educational programs and presentations and established zoo branches in other parts of New York.

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