In Module 1 you learned that most European landscapes have been heavily degraded by human intervention. Negative impacts are particularly apparent if we examine change over extensive geographical areas or over significant timescales.
One fundamental role of people involved in rewilding is to look at a particular area of land or sea and work out which natural processes are degraded or missing. The best ways of restoring these processes can then be identified.
Natural process restoration can then enhance the health and functionality of the land or sea in question.
Which natural processes are degraded or missing?
Activity: Natural processes that are restricted or absent
Allow 10 minutes
In Module 1 you identified natural elements that were missing from a particular landscape. Now it's time to work out why this matters. Which natural processes have been lost because those elements are missing?
Meandering river in the Greater Côa Valley, Portugal. Credit: Ricardo Ferreira
Question: This is a beautiful place but several natural processes are restricted or absent. Which natural processes are missing from the image?
As a reminder, natural processes are the virtually infinite interactions between and amongst the elements, habitats and species, occurring at different scales and over different timeframes.
This may include:
Plants interacting with the elements.
Plants interacting with animals.
Animals interacting with each other and with the earth.
Answer: As beautiful as this landscape is, you may notice:
There’s a structure across the river that is preventing it from flowing freely, which means sedimentation and erosion are also altered.
There are plots of monoculture agriculture: there is no sign of deadwood (standing or lying) which means decomposition and decay are likely to be missing.
There are no wild animals in sight, or signs of their presence. This means that scavenging, predation, browsing and grazing are likely to be missing too.
Rewilding lets nature lead, so our first approach is to work out how we can act on opportunities to restore natural processes and kick-start nature recovery. It's important to bear in mind that all the interventions taken at the start of a rewilding initiative are designed to lead towards a point where those interventions are no longer required and where healthy nature looks after itself.
Rewilding is not about restoring a picture that then needs curating – it's about creating fully functional natural systems that can sustain themselves.
