Frogs leap back to Tallaght thanks to re-wilding of grasslands and rivers (Ireland) – via Herp Digest

The Echo, Ireland, May 24, 2019 by Hayden Moore

AMPHIBIANS are reaching new areas around the county because of the re-wilding process of grasslands in parks and the surrounding rivers.

Back in February, local conservationist Collie Ennis told The Echo that a majority of ponds, wetlands and areas once used by amphibians as breeding sites have disappeared because of urban expansion.

A frog that Collie Ennis found in Dodder Valley Park during the week.

In a video he made this week while out collecting brambles in Dodder Valley park in Tallaght, Collie said that to his surprise he found that frogs had returned to the area for the first time in years.

“Four years ago, I was out in this area surveying and [the frogs] were barely reaching down as far as the Old Mill Pub there,” said Collie, the Science Office for the Herpetological Society of Ireland.

“Now they are making it right down past the weir and down as far as Templeogue and Terenure.”

As part of the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan, South Dublin County Council has been reducing its grass mowing regimes to allow for greater biodiversity.

In a statement to The Echo, a spokesperson from the council said: “South Dublin County Council is committed to ensuring bio-diversity by contributing to the protection of pollinating insects.

“Since the launch of the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan, two locations for the placement of bee hives have been successful.

“The Heritage Officer has also directed an additional focus on identifying and managing pollinator-specific meadows in Council's parks and all Council Parks and Open Spaces are currently being reviewed including Dodder Valley Park.

“This involves the identification of grassland locations which are suitable for reduced mowing regimes to allow for longer periods of flowering for wildflowers and grasses, with seasonal cutting of the meadows at appropriate times.”

With it also being Biodiversity Week, Collie explained how important it is for future generations to see local amphibians.

“I think this shows that you can make a difference, whether you live in a 10-acre farm up the mountains or a council house in Tallaght”, Collie said.

“Throw some rotten wood out your back and build a pond and it’ll make a difference – you’ll get a great bit of pleasure seeing all the newts, frogs, badgers and frogs and all.

“It’s important that our kids and their kids get to see these local animals.”

Caledonia’s lost forest to be restored to glory in £23m rewilding

Ancient woodland will be pieced back together as part of Europe-wide project that will give endangered species their habitats back

Robin McKie, Science Editor

Sun 7 Oct 2018 07.00 BST

Only a few tattered scraps of woodland in the Cairngorms provide evidence that a vast forest once covered the Scottish Highlands and much of the rest of the nation. This vast arboreal canopy provided homes for wolves, lynx, elks and many other species.

Land clearances for farming, and felling trees for timber, destroyed most of that habitat hundreds of years ago, leaving only a few disconnected fragments of land to provide shelter for dwindling numbers of animals.

But conservationists believe they may soon be able to restore a substantial chunk of this lost landscape and bring Caledonia’s beleaguered forest back to some of its ancient glory. A £23m Endangered Landscapes Programme (ELP)has selected the remains of the Caledonian Forest to be the focus of a key restoration project – along with seven other major regeneration schemes – to restore Europe’s most threatened environments.

 “The aim of the Scottish project is to connect up the fragments of Caledonian Forest with land that is no longer degraded – as it is at present – so that threatened species can communicate and move around,” said Jeremy Roberts, of the RSPB, one of the major groups involved in the Cairngorms Connect project.

“We are also going to provide restored habitats for threatened species that include rare sphagnum mosses, sundews, dragonflies and damson flies. It is going to be the biggest habitat restoration project in Britain. We will be working on more than 600 square kilometres of land.”

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Dutch rewilding experiment sparks backlash as thousands of animals starve

Conservation

A scheme to rewild marshland east of Amsterdam has been savaged by an official report and sparked public protest after deer, horses and cattle died over the winter

Patrick Barkhamin Oostvaardersplassen

Fri 27 Apr 2018 10.41 BSTLast modified on Fri 27 Apr 2018 22.00 BST

It is known as the Dutch Serengeti, a bold project to rewild a vast tract of land east of Amsterdam. But a unique nature reserve where red deer, horses and cattle roam free on low-lying marsh reclaimed from the sea has been savaged by an official report after thousands of animals starved.

In a blow to the rewilding vision of renowned ecologists, a special committee has criticised the authorities for allowing populations of large herbivores to rise unchecked at Oostvaardersplassen, causing trees to die and wild bird populations to decline.

It follows growing anger in the Netherlands over the slaughter of more than half Oostvaardersplassen’s red deer, Konik horses and Heck cattle because they were starving. After a run of mild winters, the three species numbered 5,230 on the fenced 5,000-hectare reserve. Following a harsher winter, the population is now just 1,850. Around 90% of the dead animals were shot by the Dutch state forestry organisation, which manages the reserve, before they could die of starvation.

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Nature notes: Wildcats, wolves and lynxes could make a return to the British countryside

Hana Carter 

1 APRIL 2016 • 1:59PM

Wildcats could be reintroduced to the Devon countryside as part of a "rewilding" programme.

The Wildwood Trust has created a natural woodland enclosure for its new wildcats which it hopes will show how they once prowled Devon.

One of the new arrivals, Staffin, has been recognised as one of the purest British wildcats left in the wild. It is to be joined by a female and their offspring will be part of a national breeding programme aimed at preventing the species' extinction.

Scottish wildcat monitored for wildlife project

The wildcat is confined to the north of Scotland, and became extinct in England in the 19th century. Peter Smith, founder of the Wildwood Trust, says he would like to see the reintroduction of lynx and even wolves. Mr Smith said: "By changing the rules of agricultural subsidies and returning animals like wildcats, our uplands could blossom with wildlife."

Source

Rewilding the future

Date:October 27, 2015

Source:Aarhus University

New research shows that the loss of large animals has had strong effects on ecosystem functions, and that reintroducing large animal faunas may restore biodiverse ecosystems.

Rewilding is gaining a lot of interest as an alternative conservation and land management approach in recent years, but remains controversial. It is increasingly clear that Earth harbored rich faunas of large animals -- such as elephants, wild horses and big cats -- pretty much everywhere, but that these have starkly declined with the spread of humans across the world -- a decline that continues in many areas.

A range of studies now show that these losses have had strong effects on ecosystem functions, and a prominent strain of rewilding, trophic rewilding, focuses on restoring large animal faunas and their top-down food-web effects to promote self-regulating biodiverse ecosystems.

A new study led by researchers from Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, published in PNAS today, synthesizes the current scientific research on trophic rewilding and outlines key research priorities for rewilding science.

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On safari in the South Downs: the 'rewilding' of Knepp

A daring experiment to 'rewild’ an estate in Sussex and other vast tracts of Britain is allowing native species to thrive once more, says Julia Llewellyn Smith

By Julia Llewellyn Smith

7:00AM BST 26 Sep 2015

It’s just gone noon at the Knepp estate in West Sussex and from a platform attached to an oak tree, Sir Charles Burrell and I are admiring his 3,500 acres.

Beyond its boundaries are the manicured, sprayed fields of the South Downs, but here we could be in Africa, looking down over endless scrub, criss-crossed with animal tracks.

“In just a couple of weeks it’ll be the deer rut, the craziest time of year at Knepp,” says Burrell happily. “There’ll be red deer stags and fallow bucks charging around the place full of testosterone, clashing antlers and fighting gladiatorial battles. The woods will be ringing with primeval roars, and the air is full of the pungent smell of pheromones. When you’re living in the middle of it you can hardly sleep at night.”

It’s difficult to believe that just 15 years ago, this unfettered scenery was all tidy wheat fields and pasture. In 1987, when Burrell, 53, took over the management of the estate that had been in his family for 200 years, every inch of the land had been ploughed up for intensive farming, with ryegrass growing right up to the front door of his Nash castle.

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New rewilding area to be launched in Europe

The Oder Delta, on the border between Poland and Germany, is set to become the eighth area of Europe to be designated as part of the Rewilding Europe initiative.

The project's aims are to establish 10 areas for the reintroduction of wild animals that formerly roamed such habitats but which have died out.

The new location is strategically placed at one of the natural crossroads in Europe. This transboundary region has seen a spontaneous comeback of wildlife and increasing wild natural areas over the past decades.

Polders that had been drained have been re-flooded, rivers have been restored and large areas have been set aside for nature – with positive results.

Nature has regenerated well, and iconic wildlife species have discovered these new habitats and have started to come back.

Being close to Berlin, Szczecin, and many summer resorts along the Baltic coast, this new, dynamic landscape also creates new sources of income and pride for local people.

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'Rewilding' dingoes could help reverse decline of Australia's native wildlife

Scientists say altering dingo-proof fencing to allow the predators into a NSW national park to prey upon pests could help restore balance to the ecosystem

Oliver Milman

@olliemilman

Tuesday 17 February 2015 03.02 GMTLast modified on Tuesday 17 February 201503.14 GMT

Australia’s lengthy “dingo fence” should be altered to allow dingoes into a national park to test whether they can help reverse the precipitous decline of native wildlife, a group of conservation experts has recommended.

The bold experiment would involve remodelling the dingo-proof fence that stretches from eastern Queensland to the South Australian coastline. At more than 5,500km long, the barrier, originally constructed in the 1880s to keep out rabbits, is the longest fence in the world.

Altering the fence’s boundary would enable dingoes to enter the Sturt national park in New South Wales, allowing scientists to assess whether dingoes, long reviled by many people as dangerous to livestock and even humans, could in fact act as saviours for threatened native animals.

Dingoes are known to prey upon kangaroos, emus and feral goats and it’s thought they also deter foxes and feral cats – the two introduced predators blamed for causing massive declines in animals such as bilbies, bandicoots and bettongs across Australia.

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Why bring wolves back to the UK?

How would reintroducing wolves and lynx back to Britain work, and what’s the point?

Lucy Siegle

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.

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Giant tortoises show rewilding can work (Via HerpDigest)

Giant tortoises show rewilding can work

'Rewilding with taxon substitutes', the intentional introduction of exotic species to fulfil key functions in ecosystems following the loss of recently extinct species, is highly controversial, partly due to a lack of rigorous scientific studies.

In a paper published today in Current Biology, Christine Griffiths of Bristol's School of Biological Sciences and colleagues present the first empirical evidence that rewilding can work.
Exotic giant Aldabra tortoises, Aldabrachelys gigantea, were introduced to Ile aux Aigrettes, a 25-hectare island off Mauritius, in 2000 to disperse the slow-growing ebony Diospyros egrettarum (Ebenaceae), which once covered the island, but today is critically endangered following intensive logging for firewood that lasted until the early 1980s.

To highlight the extent to which the ebony forest had been decimated, the researchers surveyed and mapped all ebony trees in an island-wide survey in 2007 and located a total of 3,518 adult trees. However, large tracts of the island remained denuded of ebony, particularly in the northern and eastern coastal areas nearest to the mainland where logging was most intense.

There had been no regeneration in these areas even though logging ceased thirty years ago because, with the extinction of the island's native giant tortoises, there were no large fruit-eating animals left to disperse the seeds of these critically-endangered trees.

The introduced Aldabra tortoises not only ingested the large fruits and dispersed large numbers of ebony seeds, but the process of passing through a tortoise's gut also improved seed germination, leading to the widespread, successful establishment of new ebony seedlings in the heavily logged parts of the island.

Christine Griffiths said: "Our results demonstrate that the introduction of these effective seed dispersers is aiding the recovery of this critically endangered tree whose seeds were previously seed-dispersal limited. Reversible rewilding experiments such as ours are necessary to investigate whether extinct interactions can be restored."

Professor Stephen Harris, co-author of the study, said: "Ecological restoration projects generally involve the plant community, as more often the animal components are extinct. There is, however, increasing evidence that restoration ecologists should be most concerned with the decline of species interactions, rather than species extinctions per se. Species interactions structure ecological communities, and provide essential ecosystem processes and functions such as pollination, seed dispersal and browsing, that are necessary for the self-regulation and persistence of a community."

Contact: Hannah Johnson
hannah.johnson@bristol.ac.uk
44-117-928-8896
University of Bristol