Connor Lovell

Biodiversity, Ecology and Conservation

KCL

IOZ

The British Deer Society (BDS)

Gary Polhill (The James Hutton Institute),

Rewilding, broadly defined as ‘the nature-led reorganisation and restoration of ecosystem processes and functions with minimal ongoing human intervention’, is a nature conservation concept and philosophy rapidly gaining traction in both scientific and non-scientific circles. To this end, rewilding has been proposed as a major tool in mitigating biodiversity loss and climate change. Despite this, many rewilding interventions are based on opinion and anecdotal evidence and lack a scientific evidence base. Often, ungulate communities, namely deer and wild boar/feral pigs, are introduced to rewilding projects to mimic historical ecological processes. However, there is very little empirical research into how these ‘megafauna’ communities impact environmental processes. Furthermore, there is very little understanding of the socio-ecological conflicts ungulates cause on rewilding projects.

To address some of these research gaps, the interspecific interactions between different ungulate species will first be elucidated, before attempting to infer how these ‘megafauna’ communities influence functional group diversity and carbon storage. Then, by modelling future scenarios the socio-ecological conflicts associated with rewilding will be elucidated. The Bunloit rewilding project in Scotland (https://www.bunloit.com) will be used as a study site to address these aims. Overall, this research aims to grow the scientific evidence base for rewilding.

As rewilding is proposed as a solution to improve biodiversity and sequester carbon, the results of this project will help inform policy surrounding biodiversity, climate change, natural capita, and nature-based solutions. This project will also help inform land managers and rewilding projects ‘on the ground’ to improve outcomes to biodiversity and climate change, whilst also informing on and predicting potential socio-ecological conflicts.

The Bunloit Rewilding Project website: https://www.bunloit.com/

• Connor Lovell, Shiya Li, Jessica Turner, Chris Carbone (2022) The effect of habitat and human disturbance on the spatiotemporal activity of two urban carnivores: The results of an intensive camera trap study Ecology and Evolution DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.8746