Rewilding Group

Contact:

Co-chairs: Nathalie Pettorelli and James Bullock 

Social: Twitter

Background:

Rewilding, a developing concept in ecosystem stewardship, is expected to play a critical role in supporting nature recovery efforts worldwide.

Connecting people engaged, sometimes passionately, with a topic is a great way to advance scientific knowledge and build consensus around controversial concepts.

This is particularly true when considering a topic like rewilding, an increasingly common approach to environmental management that has attracted criticism from many scientists and from a wide range of stakeholders outside the scientific community, on legal, political, economic and cultural grounds. Literature on rewilding has grown rapidly over the past decade but remains heavily dominated by essays and opinion pieces, rather than empirical studies, leading to a limited availability of practical experience or hard science to draw from. Moreover, much of the scientific discussion has so far focused on highlighting the conceptual similarities and differences between restoration and rewilding practices, but potential synergies are rarely being explicitly discussed, even though the strategic combination of both approaches has the potential to transform the pace, costs and ecological outcomes of the large-scale recovery of nature needed to address societal challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss.

This SIG was set up in 2024 to boost information availability and knowledge transfer on rewilding, supporting the emergence of new collaborations and innovation in rewilding science and practice, in the UK and globally.

Aims:

• Promote knowledge transfer and collaboration among researchers and practitioners involved in rewilding.
• Facilitate the coordination and integration of the restoration and rewilding agendas.
• Organise networking events and highlight developments and opportunities through regular newsletters.
• Notes from previous Practitioner’s academic discussions and events hosted by the Rewilding SIG can be found here.

Join the mailing list:

If you are interested in joining the mailing list please sign up here. 

Meetings and Events

For all upcoming events please see the events page.

Committee

• Co-chairs: Nathalie Pettorelli and James Bullock 
• PhD reps: Cameron Goodhead (Durham Uni) and Connor Lovell (King’s College London)
• ECRs reps: Rebecca Senior (Durham) and Emily Warner (Oxford)
• Communication lead: Sarah Papworth (Royal Holloway)
• EDI champion: Will Pearse (Imperial College London)
• Business champion: Christopher Sandom (Sussex Uni)
• Practitioners reps: Sahran Higgins (Rewilding Britain) and Benedict Dempsey (WWF-UK)
• Social Science lead: Kim ward (Plymouth University)