Rewilding Abandoned Landscapes in Europe

Abstract

For millennia, mankind has shaped landscapes, particularly through agriculture. In Europe, the age-old interaction between humans and ecosystems strongly influenced the cultural heritage. Yet European farmland is now being abandoned, especially in remote areas. The loss of the traditional agricultural landscapes and its consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem services is generating concerns in both the scientific community and the public. Here we ask to what extent farmland abandonment can be considered as an opportunity for rewilding ecosystems. We analyze the perceptions of traditional agriculture in Europe and their influence in land management policies. We argue that, contrary to the common perception, traditional agriculture practices were not environmentally friendly and that the standards of living of rural populations were low. We suggest that current policies to maintain extensive farming landscapes underestimate the human labor needed to sustain these landscapes and the recent and future dynamics of the socio-economic drivers behind abandonment. We examine the potential benefits for ecosystems and people from rewilding. We identify species that could benefit from land abandonment and forest regeneration and the ecosystem services that could be provided such as carbon sequestration and recreation. Finally, we discuss the challenges associated with rewilding, including the need to maintain open areas, the fire risks, and the conflicts between people and wildlife. Despite these challenges, we argue that rewilding should be recognized by policy-makers as one of the possible land management options in Europe, particularly on marginal areas.

Simulating and delineating future land change trajectories across Europe

“…The four scenario storylines follow closely the IPCC SRES framework (Nakicenovic et al 2000), but the drivers were modified to represent the conditions specific to the EU and were supplemented with conditions that address land use change in the European context. Importantly, our scenarios differed in their degree of regionalization versus globalization, and the extent of policy intervention (Table 1).…”

Use of unmanned aerial system to assess wildlife (Sus scrofa) damage to crops (Zea mays)

“…The causes of this overabundance are multifactorial, involving simultaneously (i) higher food resource availability, naturally from the increase of mast production (Drobyshev et al 2014) and artificially from agriculture and supplementary feeding (Milner et al 2014), (ii) increased availability of suitable lands due to land abandonment (Navarro and Pereira 2012) and the net gain of forest cover in Eurasia (Hansen et al 2013), climate change (Forchhammer et al 1998), and its interaction with natural food resources availability (Bieber and Ruf 2005;Vetter et al 2015). The expansion of ungulate populations leads to the increase of conflicting situations with humans' activities (e.g., forestry and agriculture or vehicle collisions).…”

Resilience-Based Perspectives to Guiding High-Nature-Value Farmland through Socioeconomic Change

“…Large areas have been afforested in the past, often accompanied by losses of biodiversity, landscape, and sociocultural values, as well as increasing wildfire problems (MacDonald et al 2000). However, it has recently been argued that land abandonment may open up opportunities for rewilding ecosystems (Navarro and Pereira 2012), if risk and propagation of wildfires can be managed and if seed banks, neighboring natural vegetation, and connectivity of a landscape provide potential for "passive restoration. "…”