India, Oct. 22 -- How do you bring a species back to an island when only two animals remain? That was the challenge on Isle Royale, a wilderness national park in Lake Superior, where the last two wolves were not breeding. A five-year assessment published in Conservation Science and Practice said a restoration project that began in 2018 achieved its goal of establishing a self-sustaining wolf population. The study period ran from September 24, 2018, to September 1, 2023. It also used computer modeling to examine the odds of the wolves still being alive on the island 20 years from now.

According to a 2017 BioScience article by Mech and colleagues, wolves and moose have been studied on the 540-square-kilometer island since 1958. Wolves arri...