WCS in New York

"WCS’s system of wildlife parks leads the world in the care of animals and staff dedication to animal enrichment, science, and exhibitry. "

Since 1895, WCS has worked from our New York based Bronx Zoo headquarters to save wildlife and wild lands throughout the world.

We uniquely combine the resources of wildlife parks in New York with field projects around the globe to inspire care for nature, provide leadership in environmental education, and help sustain our planet's biological diversity.

Today WCS is at work in 53 nations across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America, protecting wild landscapes that are home to a vast variety of species from butterflies to tigers.

Our pioneering environmental education programs reach millions locally, nationally, and internationally.

And the more than 4 million visitors who annually experience our Bronx Zoo, New York Aquarium, and Central Park, Queens, and Prospect Park Zoos are encouraged to learn about our natural world, and inspired to care about its future.

Metropolitan Conservation Alliance
The Wildlife Conservation Society's Metropolitan Conservation Alliance bridges the gulf between science and practice by developing innovative, locally-based strategies that tackle ecosystem loss and urban sprawl at the suburban/rural frontier. Urban centers around the world are often located in biologically rich regions because civilizations thrive where there is an abundance of natural resources such as water, fertile soils, sheltered harbors, and food. Conservation efforts are especially challenging in these densely populated, biologically rich areas. There is much that is worth protecting; at the same time many land uses compete for resources. In such settings, conservation can only be achieved by working together—collaborating across political boundaries and establishing common goals among the many interest groups.

Adirondack Communities and Conservation Program

The Adirondack Park in northern New York State is a model of people coexisting with wilderness. With a nearly equal division of public and private land, the Adirondacks have strong voices supporting both conservation and community interests. WCS involvement emerged in 1994 with the goal of bringing stakeholders together to advance the mutual interests of communities and conservation.

Adirondack Living Landscapes Program


The WCS Living Landscapes Program develops wildlife-based strategies for conservation of large, wild ecosystems that are integrated into wider landscapes of human influence. WCS is using this approach in the Adirondacks and elsewhere to identify groups of species to represent the diversity and functional health of complex landscapes, explicitly linking these with priority conservation issues. The Adirondack Park Living Landscapes Program is using the WCS Landscape Species approach to identify where and why human-wildlife conflict occurs and to design and undertake conservation efforts to curb such conflict.

The Mannahatta Project

The aim of the Mannahatta Project is to reconstruct the ecology of Manhattan when Henry Hudson first sailed by in 1609 and compare it to what we know of the island today. Using GPS (Global Positions Systems) and GIS (Geographic Information Systems), the Mannahatta Project will help us to understand, down to the level of one city block, where in Manhattan streams once flowed or where American chestnuts may have grown, where black bears once marked territories, and where the Lenape fished and hunted.