Rewilding means returning a non-wild area back to the wild. Rewilding has attracted critics from a wide range of sources, on scientific, legal, political, bureaucratic, emotional, economic, cultural and other grounds, leading to an unusually—for conservation issues—vigorous public debate .

   Prof. Richard Corlett of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) reviewed critics of rewilding on the science. By consulting a large amount of literature, he found that the concept originated in North America, where it was initially focused on reconnecting existing wilderness areas and re-establishing populations of large carnivores and other large vertebrates. The modern literature is dominated by European studies, however, in which rewilding is seen as a management option for the increasing areas of abandoned agricultural land.

  Rewilding uses the minimum possible human intervention in order to allow ecosystems to develop spontaneously. Passive rewilding has obvious attractions, but its adoption as conservation policy requires a willingness to accept whatever happens. The biodiversity case for rewilding in Europe often depends on the prioritization of large, charismatic vertebrate species over smaller, disturbance-dependent plants and animals. These latter species, however, can potentially be accommodated in smaller areas of low-intensity agriculture managed for this purpose.

The researcher regards that the biggest question is whether rewilding will be seen increasingly as a substitute for traditional preservationist-restorationist approaches to conservation or only as a supplement to these.

The researchers emphasizes that rewilding science needs to catch up with rewilding practice, and there is an urgent need for replicated, large-scale, long-term experiments.

  The review entitled “The Role of Rewilding in Landscape Design for Conservation” has been published in Current Landscape Ecology Reports.

Contact
Prof. Richard Corlett  Ph.D Principal Investigator
Center for Integrative Conservation, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Menglun, Mengla, Yunnan 666303, China
E-mail: corlett@xtbg.org.cn