Explore the vast range of titles available.

Restoration ecology has historically focused on reconstructing communities of highly visible taxa while less visible taxa, such as invertebrates and microbes, are ignored. This is problematic as invertebrates and microbes make up the vast bulk of biodiversity and drive many key ecosystem processes, yet they are rarely actively reintroduced following restoration, potentially limiting ecosystem function and biodiversity in these areas. In this review, we discuss the current (limited) incorporation of invertebrates and microbes in restoration and rewilding projects. We argue that these groups should be actively rewilded during restoration to improve biodiversity, ecosystem function outcomes, and highlight how they can be used to greater effect in the future. For example, invertebrates and microbes are easily manipulated, meaning whole communities can potentially be rewilded through habitat transplants in a practice that we refer to as “whole‐of‐community” rewilding. We provide a framework for whole‐of‐community rewilding and describe empirical case studies as practical applications of this under‐researched restoration tool that land managers can use to improve restoration outcomes. We hope this new perspective on whole‐of‐community restoration will promote applied research into restoration that incorporates all biota, irrespective of size, while also enabling a better understanding of fundamental ecological theory, such as colonization and competition trade‐offs. This may be a necessary consideration as invertebrates that are important in providing ecosystem services are declining globally; targeting invertebrate communities during restoration may be crucial in stemming this decline. Restoration and rewilding projects have historically overlooked the role played by invertebrates and microbes in restoring ecosystems. Here, we review the current state of microbial and invertebrate rewilding projects and provide recommendations on how projects can move forward in the future.

Guerrilla rewilding, the unsanctioned release of species into the wild, is a controversial activity criticized by most conservation professionals. In this Forum article we argue that despite this criticism, it has played a significant but underexplored role in the UK’s rewilding movement. Using examples including butterfly species, goshawk Astur gentilis , wild boar Sus scrofa , beaver Castor fiber and lynx Lynx lynx , we argue that examining these guerrilla rewilding acts provides valuable insights into public preferences for certain species, their perceived acceptability, and the ways in which they shape knowledge and practices of human–wildlife coexistence. However, our analysis also suggests that in some cases guerrilla rewilding can undermine the very species it seeks to restore. Animals released without preparation or monitoring, particularly those habituated to human presence, often lack the ability to survive independently, leading to welfare issues, human–wildlife conflict and wider ecological impacts. Furthermore, by circumventing the social and collaborative dimensions of rewilding, these actions risk deepening divisions among stakeholders, which are critical to ensuring long-term success. Nonetheless, this type of rewilding can also potentially trigger more positive emotions of recovery whilst raising the species’ profile. We find that guerrilla rewilding has in some cases influenced formal rewilding practice and the broader discourse in the UK, in stark contrast to the official government position on nature recovery. This paper draws together some key learning points and highlights areas for future research on guerrilla rewilding.

Trophic rewilding aims to promote biodiverse self-sustaining ecosystems through the restoration of ecologically important taxa and the trophic interactions and cascades they propagate. How rewilding effects manifest across broad temporal scales will determine ecosystem states; however, our understanding of post-rewilding dynamics across longer time periods is limited. Here we show that the restoration of a megaherbivore, the African savannah elephant (Loxodonta africana), promotes landscape openness (i.e., various measures of vegetation composition/complexity) and modifies fauna habitat and that these effects continue to manifest up to 92 years after reintroduction. We conducted a space-for-time floristic survey and assessment of 17 habitat attributes (e.g., floristic diversity and cover, ground wood, tree hollows) across five comparable nature reserves in South African savannah, where elephants were reintroduced between 1927 and 2003, finding that elephant reintroduction time was positively correlated with landscape openness and some habitat attributes (e.g., large-sized tree hollows) but negatively associated with others (e.g., large-sized coarse woody debris). We then indexed elephant site occurrence between 2006 and 2018 using telemetry data and found positive associations between site occurrence and woody plant densities. Taken alongside the longer-term space-for-time survey, this suggests that elephants are attracted to dense vegetation in the short term and that this behavior increases landscape openness in the long term. Our results suggest that trophic rewilding with elephants helps promote a semi-open ecosystem structure of high importance for African biodiversity. More generally, our results suggest that megafauna restoration represents a promising tool to curb Earth’s recent ecological losses and highlights the importance of considering long-term ecological responses when designing and managing rewilding projects.

Rewilding is gaining importance across Europe, as agricultural abandonment trajectories provide opportunities for large‐scale ecosystem restoration. However, its effective implementation is hitherto limited, in part due to a lack of monitoring of rewilding interventions and their interactions. Here, we provide a first assessment of rewilding progress across seven European sites. Using an iterative and participatory Delphi technique to standardize and analyze expert‐based knowledge of these sites, we 1) map rewilding interventions onto the three central components of the rewilding framework (i.e. stochastic disturbances, trophic complexity and dispersal), 2) assess rewilding progress by quantifying 19 indicators spanning human forcing and ecological integrity and 3) compile key success and threat factors for rewilding progress. We find that the most common interventions were keystone species reintroductions, whereas the least common targeted stochastic disturbances. We find that rewilding scores have improved in five sites, but declined in two, partly due to competing socio‐economic trends. Major threats for rewilding progress are related to land‐use intensification policies and persecution of keystone species. Major determinants of rewilding success are its societal appeal and socio‐economic benefits to local people. We provide an assessment of rewilding that is crucial in improving its restoration outcomes and informed implementation at scale across Europe in this decade of ecosystem restoration.

Humans have encroached upon a majority of Earth's lands. The current extinction crisis is a testament to human impacts on wilderness. If there is any hope of retaining a biodiverse planetary system, we must begin to learn how to coexist with, and leave space for, other species. The practice of “rewilding” has emerged as a method for returning wild lands, and wildness, to landscapes we have altered. Perino et al. review this concept and present a framework for implementing it broadly and in a way that considers ongoing human interaction. Science , this issue p. eaav5570 The practice of rewilding has been both promoted and criticized in recent years. Benefits include flexibility to react to environmental change and the promotion of opportunities for society to reconnect with nature. Criticisms include the lack of a clear conceptualization of rewilding, insufficient knowledge about possible outcomes, and the perception that rewilding excludes people from landscapes. Here, we present a framework for rewilding that addresses these concerns. We suggest that rewilding efforts should target trophic complexity, natural disturbances, and dispersal as interacting processes that can improve ecosystem resilience and maintain biodiversity. We propose a structured approach to rewilding projects that includes assessment of the contributions of nature to people and the social-ecological constraints on restoration.

The widespread extirpation of megafauna may have destabilized ecosystems and altered biodiversity globally. Most megafauna extinctions occurred before the modern record, leaving it unclear how their loss impacts current biodiversity. We report the long-term effects of reintroducing plains bison (Bison bison) in a tallgrass prairie versus two land uses that commonly occur in many North American grasslands: 1) no grazing and 2) intensive growing-season grazing by domesticated cattle (Bos taurus). Compared to ungrazed areas, reintroducing bison increased native plant species richness by 103% at local scales (10 m²) and 86% at the catchment scale. Gains in richness continued for 29 y and were resilient to the most extreme drought in four decades. These gains are now among the largest recorded increases in species richness due to grazing in grasslands globally. Grazing by domestic cattle also increased native plant species richness, but by less than half as much as bison. This study indicates that some ecosystems maintain a latent potential for increased native plant species richness following the reintroduction of native herbivores, which was unmatched by domesticated grazers. Native-grazer gains in richness were resilient to an extreme drought, a pressure likely to become more common under future global environmental change.

Restoration of degraded areas is now a central tool in humanity’s response to continued species-loss. However, restoration projects often report exceedingly slow or failed recolonization of fauna, especially dispersal-constrained groups such as invertebrates. Active interventions via reintroducing or “rewilding” invertebrates may assist recolonization and speed up restoration of communities toward a desired target. However, invertebrate rewilding is rarely implemented during ecological restoration. Here, we studied the efficacy of invertebrate rewilding as a means of reintroducing dispersal-constrained species and improving diversity and compositional similarities to remnant communities during restoration. Rewilding was conducted by transplanting leaf litter and soil, including associated communities of invertebrates from species rich remnant sites into species poor, and geographically isolated, revegetated farmland sites. We sampled pre- and post-rewilding invertebrate communities in remnant, rewilded revegetation, and control revegetation sites. We analyzed morphospecies richness, abundance, community composition, and modeled morphospecies traits (dispersal method/trophic guild) using a Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities approach to determine which biological properties facilitated establishment. Beetle (Coleoptera) morphospecies richness increased rapidly in rewilded sites and was indistinguishable from remnant communities as early as 7 months post-rewilding. Beetle community similarity in the rewilding sites significantly deviated from the control sites 27 months post-rewilding, however remnant communities remained distinct over the study timeframe. Establishment success varied as other taxa did not respond as consistently as beetles within the study timeframe. Furthermore, there were no discernible shifts in dispersal traits in rewilded sites. However, predatory morphospecies were more likely to establish post-rewilding than other trophic groups. Our results demonstrate that the relatively simple act of transplanting leaf litter can result in comparatively large increases in morphospecies richness during restoration in a short timeframe. We advocate methodologies such as ours should be adopted more frequently to address failed community restoration as they are cost-effective and can be easily applied by practitioners in various restoration settings. However, further efficacy tests (e.g., varying the number of rewilding events) and longer study timeframes are needed to ensure effectiveness for a broader range of invertebrate taxa and ecosystems.

Urban rewilding is increasingly recognized as a nature-based solution for restoring biodiversity, mitigating climate risks, and strengthening urban resilience. Yet, empirical evidence on how rewilding is perceived and supported by both policymakers and the public—particularly in post-socialist contexts—remains scarce. This study investigates expert and community perspectives on urban rewilding in Poland through a mixed-method design: a nationwide survey of 32 municipal environmental officials and a visual preference survey with 1,000 residents of the coastal city of Sopot. Expert responses highlight strong conceptual support for rewilding’s ecological and social benefits, but also identify persistent concerns about institutional feasibility, funding, and integration into existing planning frameworks. Community results reveal consistent public endorsement of moderate rewilding, with more cautious acceptance of intensive ecological designs in highly symbolic civic spaces. Taken together, the findings suggest that urban rewilding in Central and Eastern Europe is both socially viable and ecologically desirable, but its successful implementation will depend on adaptive governance, participatory planning, and the strategic use of visual engagement tools to bridge policy ambition with public expectations.

African savannas are the last stronghold of diverse large-mammal communities, and a major focus of savanna ecology is to understand how these animals affect the relative abundance of trees and grasses. However, savannas support diverse plant life-forms, and human-induced changes in large-herbivore assemblages—declining wildlife populations and their displacement by livestock—may cause unexpected shifts in plant community composition. We investigated how herbivory affects the prevalence of lianas (woody vines) and their impact on trees in an East African savanna. Although scarce (<2% of tree canopy area) and defended by toxic latex, the dominant liana, Cynanchum viminale (Apocynaceae), was eaten by 15 wild large-herbivore species and was consumed in bulk by native browsers during experimental cafeteria trials. In contrast, domesticated ungulates rarely ate lianas. When we experimentally excluded all large herbivores for periods of 8 to 17 y (simulating extirpation), liana abundance increased dramatically, with up to 75% of trees infested. Piecewise exclusion of different-sized herbivores revealed functional complementarity among size classes in suppressing lianas. Liana infestation reduced tree growth and reproduction, but herbivores quickly cleared lianas from trees after the removal of 18-y-old exclosure fences (simulating rewilding). A simple model of liana contagion showed that, without herbivores, the long-term equilibrium could be either endemic (liana-tree coexistence) or an all-liana alternative stable state. We conclude that ongoing declines of wild large-herbivore populations will disrupt the structure and functioning of many African savannas in ways that have received little attention and that may not be mitigated by replacing wildlife with livestock.

The potential for megafauna restoration is unevenly distributed across the world, along with the socio‐political capacity of countries to support these restoration initiatives. We show that choosing a recent baseline to identify species' indigenous range puts a higher burden for megafauna restoration on countries in the Global South, which also have less capacity to support these restoration initiatives. We introduce the Megafauna Index, which considers large mammal's potential species richness and range area at the country level, to explore how the responsibility for megafauna restoration is distributed across the world according to four scenarios using various temporal benchmarks to define species' indigenous range – current, historical (1500 AD), mid‐Holocene and Pleistocene. We test how the distribution of restoration burden across the world correlates with indicators of conservation funding, human development and governance. Using a recent or historical baseline as a benchmark for restoration puts a higher pressure on African and south‐east Asian countries while lifting the responsibility from the Global North, where extinctions happened a long time ago. When using a mid‐Holocene or Pleistocene baseline, new opportunities arise for megafauna restoration in Europe and North America, respectively, where countries have a higher financial and societal capacity to support megafauna restoration. These results contribute to the debate around benchmarks in rewilding initiatives and the ethical implications of using recent baselines to guide restoration efforts. We suggest that countries from the Global North should reflect on their responsibility in supporting global restoration efforts, by both increasing their support for capacity building in the Global South and taking responsibility for restoring lost megafauna at home.