Nature recovery
4 Module summary
In this module you have learned that rewilding focuses on restoring natural processes with minimal human intervention, allowing ecosystems to recover on their own. It emphasises ecological integrity, which includes trophic complexity, connectivity and natural disturbance regimes as indicators of ecosystem health.
The process begins by identifying opportunities and developing collaborative solutions that benefit various stakeholders. Removing artificial barriers helps natural processes recover and enables wildlife to thrive. When natural return of wildlife is not possible due to poor connectivity, active measures like species translocations, especially of keystone species, are used to restore ecosystem functionality.
Now that you have completed this module, you should be able to:
- Explain how rewilding aims to restore natural processes with minimal human intervention and describe the role of ecological integrity in ecosystem health.
- Reflect that nature recovery can generate both challenges and opportunities.
- Evaluate how rewilding's various tools and approaches can transform challenges into opportunities, and how different tools and approaches are applicable in different contexts.
- Evaluate the importance of identifying and removing artificial barriers to enable the recovery of natural processes.
- Evaluate the impact of species translocations in situations of poor connectivity and analyse the effectiveness of focusing on keystone species to restore ecosystem functionality.
Next, we will look deeper into how rewilding engages people and communicates its messaging.