Rewilding effects on ecosystem resilience to droughts and wildfires across Europe

One grand challenge under climate change is to ensure the resilience (both resistance and recovery capacity) of ecosystems and their sustainable provision of services to society.

Rewilding—both active and passive—has been suggested as a scalable solution to restore self-sustaining ecosystems, promoting biodiversity and resilience to intensifying climate extremes.

However, empirical evidence across diverse social-ecological contexts is lacking, which hampers effective policymaking and practice.

With novel characterisation of vegetation diversity and ecosystem resilience based on satellite data, the purpose is to provide a societally relevant European-scale assessment of to what extent rewilding promotes landscape-scale ecosystem resilience to droughts and wildfires through promoting vegetation diversity.

More specifically, I aim to determine to what extent 1) European active and passive rewilding landscapes are resilient to climate extremes compared to protected natural areas and farmlands; 2) vegetation diversity promotes drought and wildfire resilience of rewilding landscapes; 3) megafauna (large herbivores) reintroductions promote vegetation diversity and climate resilience of active rewilding landscapes.

Unlike prior work on the role of biodiversity in ecosystem resilience, this project will be conducted at the landscape scale across broad social-ecological contexts under rapid global change, thus matching the spatiotemporal scales relevant for policymakers and society.