How would reintroducing wolves and lynx back to Britain work, and what’s the point?
The Observer, Sunday 26 October 2014
Looking for a bit of ecological excitement? Rewilding ticks many boxes. Its premise is that habitats such as the uplands of the UK are anything but wild – they’ve been scarred and deforested. So we are haemorrhaging species and failing to stem ecosystem collapse.
According to rewilding organisations, such as Rewilding Europe, to rescue this land we need to make ecosystems whole again, even if this means looking to the Pleistocene epoch (2.6m to 11,700 years ago) for inspiration. And here’s the thrilling part: if we want to return arable land to wild and reforest the uplands, we need to introduce the apex predators, such as lynx and wolves, that went with it.
If this all sounds a bit Game of Thrones, take Scotland as an example – deer have reached carrying capacity in many areas (the maximum population size that can be supported by the environment) and the intense browsing of trees prevents them from growing. Rewilding would reintroduce an apex predator to regulate the deer. In time the forest would regrow and the natural ecosystem be restored.
In some areas rewilding is up and running. In 1995 Yellowstone Park reintroduced the wolves 70 years after they had disappeared. A herd of bison (Europe’s largest mammals at 1,400lb per beast) has been established in the Romanian Carpathians in a project led by WWF Romania.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!