Rewilding is large-scale conservation aimed at restoring and protecting core wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas, and protecting or reintroducing apex predators and keystone species

Keystone species

A keystone species is a species that has a disproportionately large effect on its environment relative to its abundance. Such species play a critical role in maintaining the structure of an ecological community, affecting many other organisms in an ecosystem and helping to determine the types and...

. Rewilding projects may require ecological restoration, particularly to restore connectivity between fragmented protected areas, and reintroduction of predators where extirpated.

Origin

The word "rewilding" was coined by conservationist and activist Dave Foreman

David Foreman

Dave Foreman is a US environmentalist and co-founder of the radical environmental movement Earth First!-Work with The Wilderness Society:...

, one of the founders of the group Earth First!

Earth First!

Earth First! is a radical environmental advocacy group that emerged in the Southwestern United States in 1979. It was co-founded on April 4th, 1980 by Dave Foreman, Mike Roselle, Howie Wolke, and less directly, Bart Koehler and Ron Kezar....

 who went on to help establish both the Wildlands Project (now the Wildlands Network) and the Rewilding Institute

Rewilding Institute

The Rewilding Institute is an organization concerned with the integration of traditional wildlife and wildlands conservation to advance landscape-scale conservation...

. The term first occurred in print in 1990. The concept was further defined and expanded by conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss in a paper published in 1998. According to Soulé and Noss, rewilding is a conservation method based on "cores, corridors, and carnivores." The concepts of cores, corridors, and carnivores were further expanded upon in Continental Conservation: Scientific Foundations of Regional Reserve Networks, (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999), edited by Soulé and John Terborgh. Dave Foreman subsequently wrote the first full-length exegesis of rewilding as a conservation strategy in Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century (Island Press, 2004).

History

As a method to preserve intact, functional ecosystems and stem biodiversity loss, rewilding is based on recent scientific breakthroughs in the field of island biogeography

Island biogeography

Island biogeography is a field within biogeography that attempts to establish and explain the factors that affect the species richness of natural communities. The theory was developed to explain species richness of actual islands...

 and discoveries concerning the ecological importance of large carnivores. The publication of The Theory of Island Biogeography, by Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson in 1967 established the importance of considering the size and isolation of existing or proposed protected areas: The theory suggested that small, isolated protected areas were vulnerable to extinctions. The theory was firmly established following the publication of William D. Newmark's study of extinctions in national parks in North America.

MacArthur and Wilson's book launched a period of intense debate over how conservation could best be accomplished, as described in David Quammen's popular history, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction. With the creation of the Society for Conservation Biology in 1985, conservationists began to focus on finding solutions to the problems of habitat loss and fragmentation. Increasingly, both at the grassroots level and in the programs of international non-governmental conservation organizations, those solutions involved rewilding.

Major Rewilding Projects

Rewilding has been incorporated into plans and projects implemented by both grassroots groups and major international conservation organizations. These projects aim to protect and restore large-scale core wilderness areas, corridors (or connectivity) between them, and apex predators, carnivores, or keystone species (species which interact strongly with the environment, such as elephant and beaver). Since the publication of that foundational paper, rewilding projects have been launched around the world: They include corridor projects, such as the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative

Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative

The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative or Y2Y is a joint Canada-US charitable organization that seeks to preserve and maintain the wildlife, native plants...

 in North America (also known as Y2Y) and the European Green Belt

European Green Belt

The European Green Belt initiative is a grass-roots movement for nature conservation and sustainable development in the area of the former Iron Curtain. The term refers to both an environmental initiative as well as the area it concerns. The initiative is carried out under the patronage of the IUCN...

, built along the former Iron Curtain; transboundary projects, including those in southern Africa funded by the Peace Parks Foundation; community-conservation projects, such as the wildlife conservancies of Namibia and Kenya; and projects organized around ecological restoration, including Gondwana Link

Gondwana Link

Gondwana Link is one of the largest and most ambitious conservation projects in Australia’s history.Designed to protect and restore land across and adjoining the nation’s only global renowned biodiversity hotspot, the completed link will be an arc of bushland stretching for 1000 kilometres, from...

, regrowing native bush in a hotspot of endemism in southwest Australia, and the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste, restoring dry tropical forest and rainforest in Costa Rica. These and other projects are described in Caroline Fraser's Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution (Metropolitan Books, 2009).

Another major North American rewilding effort focused on restoring the prairie grasslands of the Great Plains is described in Richard Manning's Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape. Manning describes how the American Prairie Foundation is reintroducing bison on private land in the Missouri Breaks region of north-central Montana, with the aim of creating a prairie preserve larger than Yellowstone National Park.

Pleistocene Rewilding

Pleistocene rewilding was first proposed by Paul S. Martin, an emeritus professor of geosciences at the Desert Laboratory of the University of Arizona, in his book, Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America (University of California Press, 2005). Noting that much of the original megafauna of North America—including mammoths, ground sloths, and sabre-toothed cats—became extinct after the arrival of Homo sapiens on the continent, Martin proposed reintroducing large mammals such as African and Asian elephants, in order to restore ecological balance that was lost.

A controversial 2005 editorial in Nature, signed by a number of conservation biologists, took up the argument, urging that elephants, lions, and cheetahs could be reintroduced in protected areas in the Great Plains. The Bolson tortoise

Bolson Tortoise

The Bolson tortoise , also called the Mexican giant tortoise or Yellow-margined tortoise, is a species of tortoise from North America. Of the four North American tortoise species, it is the largest, having a carapace length of about...

, discovered in 1959 in Durango, Mexico, was the first species proposed for this restoration effort, and in 2006 the species was reintroduced to two ranches in New Mexico owned by media mogul Ted Turner

Ted Turner

Robert Edward "Ted" Turner III is an American media mogul and philanthropist. As a businessman, he is known as founder of the cable news network CNN, the first dedicated 24-hour cable news channel. In addition, he founded WTBS, which pioneered the superstation concept in cable television...

.

In 1988, researcher Sergey A. Zimov created a Pleistocene Park

Pleistocene Park

Pleistocene Park is a nature reserve south of Chersky in the Sakha Republic in northeastern Siberia, where an attempt is being made to recreate the northern steppe grassland ecosystem that flourished in the area during the last ice age.-Goals:...

in northeastern Siberia to test the possibility of restoring a full range of grazers and predators and thus restore the so-called "mammoth ecosystem." Yakutian horses, reindeer, snow sheep, elk and moose were reintroduced, and reintroduction is also planned for yak, bactrian camels, red deer, and Siberian tigers. The wood bison, a close relative of the ancient bison that died out in Siberia 1000 or 2000 years ago is also an important species for the ecology of Siberia. In 2006, 30 bison calves were flown from Edmonton, Alberta to Yakutsk; they are currently in the government-run reserve of Ust'-Buotama.

Pleistocene rewilding remains controversial: A recent letter published in the journal Conservation Biology accuses the Pleistocene camp of promoting "Frankenstein ecosystems," noting that "the biggest problem is not the possibility of failing to restore lost interactions, but rather the risk of getting new, unwanted interactions instead." The authors proposed that—rather than trying to restore a lost megafauna—conservationists should dedicate themselves to restoring existing species to their original habitats.

External links

• The Wildlands Network
• Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution
• "Rewilding the World: A Bright Spot for Biodiversity"
• The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative
• The European Green Belt
• The Peace Parks Foundation
• Gondwana Link
• Area de Conservacion Guanacaste, Costa Rica
• Lewa Wildlife Conservancy
• WWF Terai Arc Landscape Project
• Bengal Tiger relocated to Sariska from Ranthambore | Times of India
• African lion populations declining steadily - Will reintroduction be the only way to save some populations? | Wildlife Extra
• The Rewilding Institute
• Wildlands Network N. America (formerly Wildlands project)
• Rewilding and Biodiversity: Complementary Goals for Continental Conservation, Michael Soulé & Reed Noss, Wild Earth, Wildlands Project Fall 1998 http://www.wildlandsnetwork.org/files/pdf/rewilding.pdf]
• Wildland Network UK
• Self-willed land
• Stolzenburg, William. Where the Wild Things Were. Conservation in Practice 7(1):28-34.