Rewilding And The Water Cycle

About this Webinar

Animals and plants can have a profound influence on Earth surface processes and landforms across multiple scales, with important implications for environmental resilience, restoration and hazards. Such ‘ecosystem engineer’ species can generate potential for working with natural processes to restore degraded environments. For example, reintroducing missing ecosystem engineers can enhance and accelerate environmental restoration, potentially reducing the need for direct intervention and hence costs. While water resource management is increasingly emphasising the importance of working with natural ecosystem processes to deliver multiple environmental, social and economic benefits, prevailing approaches (e.g. Natural Flood Management) have tended to focus on strategic placement of measures in the landscape, rather than whole-system restoration. Rewilding is a radical new conservation approach that is rapidly gaining momentum globally and has been advocated as a vital tool in reversing biodiversity decline. Rewilding involves restoring wildness to anthropogenically altered landscapes, including the reintroduction of missing species. It is driving dramatic biodiversity gains, but many of the wider ecosystem service benefits and their economic importance remains unquantified. This webinar will introduce key concepts associated with rewilding, illustrate some of the types of landscape change and ecosystem engineering effects that rewilding facilitates, and explore the relevance of this new approach for the water cycle and water resource management.