But the the effect of natural catastrophes, for which there is always a chance in the harsh Gobi desert , remains unknown. A viable takhi population would be so widely spread across their habitat that the impact of severe microclimatic conditions would only be felt by some parts of the population. The population would have so many strong individuals that enough would survive these conditions to be the founders of a new, regenerating population. Project managers cannot possibly influence such catastrophic events. But they can try to predict their influence and they can try to build a population large enough to withstand them.
Population growth depends on the rates of reproduction and mortality.
Both are influenced by a variety of factors. They fed some of these factors, max age of reproduction, reproductive success, mortality, occurrence of mild and severe natural catastrophes, numbers and times of release of imported takhi, etc. into the model to see how they would influence population growth. Once the relative influence of all the above factors on population growth was tested, a model was designed to determine when how many of which takhi should be released to accelerate population growth. Unfortunately, no field data were available for this parameter, so the assumptions had to be based on data from captive studies - with all their likely restrictions. Some factors that influence population growth can and others can not, or can not easily be influenced by management.