Baselines in rewilding

I had a chat with Steve Carver on Twitter earlier about the usefulness of defining a ‘baseline’ condition to aim at in a rewilding project. I’ve recorded a short video on my YouTube channel summarising my thoughts on this.

A baseline roughly sets the kind of assemblage of species and mix of habitats from the past we’re expecting to emerge at a rewilding site. I don’t think we need to look back in time in an attempt to define something we’re aiming to re-create.

Circumstances have changed; conditions aren’t the same; climatic conditions will continue to change, quite quickly, going forward. Looking back in time to some sort of baseline probably isn’t necessary or that useful.

Rather, we just need to look at contemporary conditions and at how conditions might change due to climate change. We think through which species we might expect in our site and local species pool. We can stand back and allow most of those species to colonise naturally. Some species will face both limitations in their capacity to reach our rewilding site (dispersal limitation) or be unable to establish themselves if they do arrive (establishment limitation). We can help those species get to the site, and get established, through reintroductions.

No need to define a past baseline back towards which we’re striving. Just some expectations, informed by knowledge of regional species pools and dispersal limitation. Expectations about what might assemble at the site could be expressed as hypotheses by researchers monitoring nature recovery at the site.