Rewilding in practice

Rewilding is a long-term and large-scale process which works to restore degraded ecosystems or social-ecological systems to the point that they are resilient and self-sustaining and therefore requiring little in terms of conservation management. Rewilding practice focuses on re-establishing ecological processes, including trophic levels, that were lost, mainly due to anthropogenic disturbance. It also aims to affect a paradigm shift in human-nature relationships, with intentions to better understand the interdependencies between humans and nature so that people can appreciate and accommodate nature in their landscapes, and make more informed and sustainable decisions about how we live. In this sense, rewilding has real transformational potential. The concept of rewilding emerged in the late 1980s in response to growing awareness of the extinction and climate crises and a recognition that conservation biology should be more effective, optimistic, inclusive, adaptive and more aligned with growing understanding of how ecosystems work. This shift away from traditional conservation meant that there has been a lack of guidance on how to apply rewilding, with a number of different interventions proposed in theory and used in practice, leading to conceptual debates. While the number of rewilding projects and organizations has increased globally, academic literature has tended to focus on resolving these debates and contains very little empirical evidence based on practical rewilding experience. This has led to an increasing divide between rewilding “research” and practice. This collection aims to address these issues and calls for case studies of rewilding projects which can provide insight into the practice of rewilding and provide evidence of how rewilding is being planned, implemented, and measured.