The Peneda-Gerês National Park in Northern Portugal was created in 1971 with the aim to protect the soil, water, flora and fauna, while preserving its high value to human and natural resources. It is the only national park in Portugal and supports a great diversity of habitats, some of them classified as Special Areas of Conservation in the Habitats Directive. Within the boundaries of the park, approximately 235 vertebrate species were identified, of which 200 are threatened or under protection, e.g. the Iberian wolf (Canis lupus signatus) which was almost hunted to extinction during the last century.

Historically, agro-pastoral activities were widespread in the northern region of the park, but population declines and emigration over the past 60 years led to agricultural abandonment and the possibility of wildlife comeback through passive rewilding. Consequently, the area offers the opportunity of studying the effects of land abandonment and rewilding on ecosystems and communities.

Our working group monitors those land-use changes and the resulting effects on wildlife in an ongoing project since 2015. The long-term monitoring includes weather and climate data, vegetation and land-use data obtained from aerial images as well as information on animal populations from camera trap surveys. The goal is to make all data publicly available in a large database. This rich, long-term dataset can then be used in an array of monitoring and ecological studies.

Additionally, the area serves as an educational and research site for master’s students and several PhD projects, resulting in various conservational and ecological projects that also include other focus areas and taxa.

Participants: Zuleger, Annika M.; Jörger-Hickfang, Theresa; Pereira, Henrique M.

Duration: 2015 – on-going

Funding: The project receives no specific funding.

I am working on project 11 of the TerraNova ITN project (http://www.terranova-itn.eu/): “What is the socioeconomic value of landscape management”.  The main aim of this project is to develop a framework to compare the socio-economic costs and benefits provided by ecosystems before and after rewilding, which will then be applied to selected TerraNova field sites. 

Currently I am studying conservation and, more specifically, rewilding funding, with the goal of highlighting successful funding avenues for rewilding projects. Of particular interesting are novel funding mechanisms that can generate both ecological and economic returns over time.

Contact: Rowan Dunn-Capper

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are an important, yet often underrepresented aspect of ecosystem service assessments. Aesthetic appreciation of nature is a popular example for CES, but very context-dependent and therefore hard to assess on higher than local scales. What is “aesthetic”, and how can you measure it? Taking birds as a model group, this is the focus of a doctoral thesis at our group in iDiv, in collaboration with the Central Repository for Natural Science Collections at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.

Based on an analysis of the data coverage of a Germany-wide citizen science project, we will assess which traits of birds lead to a higher probability of record submission and can thus be regarded as crucial for birds’ attractiveness to people.  This will include the application of sound- and image-processing tools to describe coloration and song characteristics of birds, and the analyses will also include data on body size, morphometric traits and behavior. With the help of global distribution data, we will examine if there are global gradients and hotspots regarding the manifestation of the mentioned traits, to see for instance where there are potentials for expanding ecotourism activities. Bird species differ in the amount of attention they get in the public, in conservation and throughout science. Another aim of this study is to explore whether this imbalance can also be explained with species-specific traits.

This project is funded by the German Environmental Foundation with a PhD scholarship for a period of three years.

Contact: Max Hofmann

The term rewilding has gained a lot of attention in the past years, recently it has been proposed as a tool for restoration of ecosystems and biodiversity conservation. Despite the potential for rewilding to address biodiversity loss, this concept has been criticised by its lack of accountability of the rewilding measures and the its low ability to predict and mitigate negative outcomes. This can be attributed to the low understanding of the role that humans play on the success of the implementation of rewilding projects. In fact, most of the present studies have focused on implementing these projects without including key stakeholders.  Adding to this, there is little knowledge on how societal perceptions on nature and wilderness dictate future outcomes of rewilding. Therefore, there is in high need for more research that addresses and studies to envision possible feedbacks between nature and society.

Scenarios are powerful tools to envision how nature might respond to different pathways of future human development and policy choices. Scenarios for rewilding can be used to evaluate and asses the effect of society on nature but also to evaluate the role that nature plays on the socio-economic development. Said that, in my project I will focus on developing multiscale scenarios for rewilding European landscapes. In order to develop these scenarios, it is necessary to first elaborate participatory scenarios with multiple stakeholders based on current challenges to meet the different societal and climate demands.  Second, it is necessary to develop biodiversity and ecosystem services models in order to asses all possible implications of the different scenarios for rewilding in the lifestyles of the communities. Finally, together with the stakeholders evaluate and identify the possible rising tensions between rewilding and the maintenance of cultural landscapes.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 813904. This output reflects the views only of the author(s), and the European Union cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

PDF Download: Terranova White Paper 2020

Contact: Laura C. Quintero U
Project coordinator: Sjoerd Kluiving
Project Manager: Ruud van Ooijen (r.van.ooijen@vu.nl)

1 January 2017 – 31 December 2019

Habitat loss is a major barrier to biodiversity conservation in the EU and to achieving the goals of the Birds and Habitats Directives and the Water Framework Directive. Restoring and maintaining large and interconnected areas of high quality habitat such as wetlands and floodplains is therefore of utmost importance for the conservation of nature in Europe in the years to come.

Implementing both the Habitats Directive and the Birds Directive, and achieving a good ecological status of waters under the Water Framework Directive, will require large-scale ecological restoration in the EU. However, progress so far has been disappointing: none of the 28 EU Member States has presented an adequate plan to restore 15% of their degraded ecosystems, in spite of their commitment under the EU Biodiversity Strategy to develop such plans.

This initiative aims to strengthen the EU ecological restoration agenda. The project is being implemented by a coalition of five organisations, covering scientific, practical and policy expertise: iDiv - German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, Rewilding Europe, WWF European Policy Office, BirdLife Europe and European Environmental Bureau.

We seek to find opportunities for rewilding European landscapes in alignment with European policies on green infrastructure, ecosystem services and restoration targets. The ultimate goal of the project is that by 2019, specific actions are taken by the EU Commission to create a coherent Ecological Network in Europe and incorporate rewilding principles in large-scale conservation policy. 

We envision ‘rewilding’ as a multifaceted concept with three broad dimensions that interact with each other: 1) restoring and giving space to natural processes, 2) reconnecting wild(er) nature with the modern economy, and 3) responding to and shaping of cosmopolitan perceptions of nature conservation among the European society.

The role of iDiv will be to conduct research on how rewilding principles can help to restore biodiversity at a European level, as well as develop a case for a strong trans European Green Infrastructure Initiative (TEN-G) to achieve the 15% Restoration target of the EU Biodiversity Strategy and the Water Framework Directive good ecological status objectives. Panels composed by multidisciplinary teams of scientists, practitioners and policy officers from across Europe will work together to pursue this research.

This project receives funding from WWF Netherlands.

Contact: Dr. Néstor Fernandez

Boosting Ecological Restoration for a Wilder Europe
Néstor Fernández, Aurora Torres, Florian Wolf, Laura Quintero and Henrique M. Pereira
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg
iDiv
1. Aufl. 2020
Format: 21,0 x 29,7 cm
Umfang: 17 S.
ISBN 978-3-9817938-5-7
https://dx.doi.org/10.978.39817938/57

As a follow on of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and modelling after the report mechanisms of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), IPBES (Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) envisages to generate science based knowledge foundation to better support policy for biodiversity conservation, sustainable development and human well-being. IPBES is a science policy interface that provides governments and stakeholders with policy relevant and scientifically credible assessments on the status and trends of biodiversity, ecosystems, and its contributions to people. IPBES produces global, regional and thematic assessments, provides methodological guides and tools to support policy decisions, and promotes coordinated research on nature and its benefits to societies around the globe.

For research to impact biodiversity conservation, scientific knowledge needs to be translated and transferred to where society make decisions for the future of nature. Scenarios can be powerful tools for envisioning how nature might respond to different pathways of human and societal development. To date, most scenarios for global environmental assessments have explored impacts of society on nature, such as biodiversity loss, but have largely undermined the role of nature and related policies in socioeconomic development.

Over the next few years, IPBES will vision and develop a new set of scenarios that will impact biodiversity conservation across scales and sectors around the globe. The new IPBES scenarios and modelling framework will shift traditional ways of forecasting impacts of society on nature to more integrative, nature-centred visions and pathways for the future of nature that are relevant for conservation policies and practice. It will integrate the socio-ecological feedback loops across divers, biodiversity, ecosystems, ecosystem services, and human well-being, incorporating multiple systems of knowledge.

Together with a wide range of stakeholders and scientific communities around the globe, the IPBES Expert Group on Scenarios and Models will build on and address gaps between existing scenarios (plausible futures for nature on local, regional, national and global scale) and desired scenarios (desired futures for nature and nature’s contributions to people) for biodiversity and ecosystem services. These desired plausible scenarios would include trends and projections of changes in demography, development, land use, global trade, economic growth, technological advancement, and human livelihoods, to name a few. They will explore alternative policies and management practices, supported by improved use of scenarios and models, to better support decision-making in nature conservation and sustainable development.

Short term activities (2017-2018)

Using the classic modelling approaches, IPBES will mobilize wider scientific communities to engage in forecasting the outlook of nature and nature’s contributions to people for the IPBES Global Assessment. The modelling communities will run existing global level models to assess the impact of IPCC’s Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) scenarios on biodiversity and ecosystem services, using harmonized land use and climate datasets. The modelled outputs will serve as an input to the ongoing IPBES Global Assessment, and potentially provide the basis for the long-term scenarios and modelling in future IPBES assessments.

Long term activities (2016-2021)

IPBES will mobilize scientific communities to align their activities in support of the IPBES scenario development and to orchestrate a long-term research agenda. The activities for developing a new generation of IPBES scenarios include visioning of the positive outlook of nature through stakeholder engagement, identifying pathways building on existing innovative good practices with potential challenges and opportunities for regime shifts, bridging scientific communities and stakeholder groups through continuous dialogue with results communication, translating visions into scenarios with quantitative and qualitative modelling and integration of multiple knowledge systems, examining policy and management relevance in supporting the use of scenarios in decisions for conservation and development.

With increased awareness of nature’s role in sustainable future, such as in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, we are at an opportune era in history where the value of biodiversity can be better acknowledged through the global governance of human and societal development. This next generation of scenarios will explore alternative visions to reach intertwined global targets, including potential synergies and trade-offs between nature conservation and other development goals. Ultimately, these scenarios will support the future assessments of IPBES with modelled results on trends, status and projections of interactive impacts of nature and society.

More information: https://www.ipbes.net/deliverables/3c-scenarios-and-modelling

Reference reading: Rosa, IMD, Pereira, HM, Ferrier, S, Alkemade, R., etc. 2017. Multiscale scenarios for nature futures. Nature Ecology & Evolution 1, 1416–1419. doi:10.1038/s41559-017-0273-9

Contact: HyeJin Kim

“Naturalness is the basis of effectiveness.” - Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Rewilding aims at the restoration of self-sustaining complex ecosystems and biodiversity while minimizing human interventions. Its main focus is the development and improvement of dispersal capacities, natural stochastic disturbances and trophic complexity within the ecosystem. Yet, evaluating the effects and progress of rewilding interventions is still a matter of discussion. Recent indicators assessed trophic complexity as a function of species composition (presence-absence of large-bodied fauna) in the area (Torres et al. 2018). But for a community to be able to fulfil its ecological function, it is also important to consider additional factors such as the abundance of the respective species or their behaviour. The abundance can have relevant implications on trophic food chains and energy flows between trophic levels, while behaviour influences inter- and intraspecific interactions as well as physiology and fitness.

The aim of this project is to evaluate rewilding progress regarding trophic complexity by assessing how “natural” a mammal community is in terms of occupancy, abundance and behaviour. An optimal natural state is hereby defined as an ecosystem without any human interference and pressure. Most of the study will be conducted in the northern part of the Peneda-Gerês National Park in Portugal, where the BioCon group already maintains a long-term monitoring project on land-use changes, passive rewilding and wildlife communities.

While information on natural and historical occurrences of large-bodied fauna are already available from previous work, we attempt to model potential natural abundances via energy flux calculations. Current occurrences and abundances will be obtained from camera trap data.

Behaviour will be assessed with a focus on species’ activity patterns, as those can also be estimated from camera trap data and recent research has shown that they represent an important part of animal behaviour with wide-ranging responses to human disturbance and effects on community functions.

We aim at developing an “naturalness” indicator implicating how much the current state of the community deviates from a potential natural state while creating a better understanding of the impacts of humans (e.g. through disturbances, fragmentation, hunting or tourism) on it. The indicator will be tested in case studies with data from different rewilding sites across Europe. We hope that it will inform researchers as well as managers and conservationists and help guide future restoration actions.

Torres, A., Fernández, N., zu Ermgassen, S., Helmer, W., Revilla, E., Saavedra, D., Perino, A., Mimet, A., Rey-Benayas, J. M., Selva, N., Schepers, F., Svenning, J.-C., & Pereira, H. M. (2018). Measuring rewilding progress. In Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 373 (1761). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0433 

Participants: Zuleger, Annika M.

Duration: 2021 - 2024

Funding: The project receives no specific funding.