Revive & Restore is pleased to announce the third meeting of the International Avian Genetic Rescue Consortium, held in Toronto, Canada from October 2-4th 2024.

Today, the consortium consists of participants from nearly 50 institutions from more than 10 nations. The formation of the consortium led to significant philanthropic donations enabling Revive & Restore to launch the “Biotechnology for Bird Conservation” Program in 2022, now funding 10 biotechnology teams in the United States, Germany, South Korea, and Japan, to develop foundational science for expanding reproductive and gene editing capabilities in a diversity of birds. If the teams succeed in their aims, their innovations could set the stage for applications in wildlife within the next 10 years.

These new tools may lead to new pathways to overcome some of the most intractable threats facing wild bird populations, such as climate change, disease, and loss of adaptive diversity. A critical supporting effort for future biotechnology interventions is biobanking high-quality cells from rare and threatened birds. This has been a primary topic of discussions in previous meetings, and as a result, Revive & Restore is currently working with San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance in developing an effort to ensure biobanking gonads of Hawaii’s most endangered forest birds by enabling on-island personnel and capacity to assist ongoing breeding efforts and field teams. We believe this is something that breeding programs and even field teams outside Hawaii may be able to accomplish in their own conservation efforts as well. At this year’s workshop, we will be holding an in-person and hands-on demonstration of how to extract and cryopreserve embryonic and adult gonads.

With the promise these new projects hold, and the many other potential ways biotechnology may aid avian conservation, it is important to continue the mission of the consortium: to implement existing biotechnologies and shape the development of new tools for the unique needs of wild birds.