What is the role of disturbance in rewilding?
Global biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate, due to human impacts, such as changes to climate, land-uses, and fire regimes. Simultaneously, these changing impacts, such as altered fire regimes, are posing a risk to human lives and values.
Innovative approaches to protect nature, lives, and property are required. One such emerging approach is rewilding, which focuses on the restoration of three important ecological processes: disturbance, trophic complexity, and dispersal (or connectivity).
Understanding the impacts of disturbance
Good evidence highlights the importance of trophic complexity in rewilding, and demonstrates its positive impact on biodiversity and ecosystem function. However, the role of disturbance in rewilding has received less attention. As disturbances become increasingly altered, it is essential to explore their role in rewilding, particularly disturbances such as fire. Key questions to address include: how does rewilding influence fire regimes? can disturbances themselves, such as fire and drought, serve as tools for rewilding? How do disturbances interact with other ecological processes central to rewilding? And finally, how can rewilding enhance ecosystem resilience to disturbances?
Attend our webinar to learn more about disturbance and rewilding
Supported by funding from the wildE project, a team of researchers from CREAF, in collaboration with partners from Biopolis, Aarhus, and the entire wildE team, are investigating these important topics. In an upcoming webinar, early career researchers from CREAF will present their work that seeks to explore the role of disturbance to rewilding. They will synthesize learnings from past actions, propose actions for the future, and explain work that explicitly tests rewilding actions.
Firstly, Dr Miriam Selwyn Álvarez will speak about the impacts of rewilding on ecosystem’s resilience to disturbance. Second, Dr Ella Plumanns Pouton will discuss a conceptual framework for restoring fire regimes through rewilding. Finally, Dr Rodrigo Balaguer Romano will explore how future drought periods combined with landscape management strategies can reduce wildfire connectivity within the Barcelona case study.