What is Rewilding?

Rewilding in the UK is a scientifically driven land management approach that seeks to restore self-sustaining ecosystems by reintroducing natural processes, species, and ecological interactions. Historically, the UK’s landscape has undergone extensive modification due to centuries of deforestation, agricultural expansion, and industrialization, leading to significant habitat fragmentation, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem instability. Rewilding can be categorized into passive rewilding (allowing natural succession with minimal human intervention), trophic rewilding (reintroducing keystone species to restore ecological balance), and species rewilding (introducing functional analogs of extinct megafauna).

Scotland, in particular, presents a critical case for rewilding given its degraded uplands, altered hydrological regimes, and intensive land-use patterns. Over 20% of Scotland is covered by peatlands, functioning as globally significant carbon sinks, holding an estimated 25% of UK’s soil carbon (Everett & Taylor, 2022). Peatlands are exceptional palaeoecological archives, preserving sub-fossil remains and geochemical proxies that provide millennia of socio-ecological history (Gearey & Fyfe, 2016). Drainage-based peatland degradation via peat extraction, non-native conifer afforestation, overgrazing have engendered enormous carbon emissions, hydrological instability, and ecosystem collapse. Restoring these landscapes is a priority for climate mitigation and natural and cultural heritage conservation.

Prominent rewilding initiatives in Scotland indicate potentialities and challenges of large-scale ecological restoration. Spanning 60,000 hectares, Cairngorms Connect is UK’s largest rewilding project targeting peatland restoration, native woodland regeneration, and nature-based flood management. Key challenges include deer overgrazing, stakeholder conflicts, and socio-political resistance to land-use changes (Underwood et al., 2022). Similarly, Mar Lodge Estate, managed by the National Trust for Scotland, is reintroducing native Caledonian pine forests to restore overall resilience via trophic interactions. These projects highlight the urgency for evidence-based rewilding strategies integrating socio-ecological and policy contexts to ensure long-term sustainability (Hawkins et al., 2024).

A major consideration in rewilding efforts is integrating preservation of cultural heritage into biodiversity conservation. Scotland’s landscapes are deeply embedded with historical narratives, from Highland Clearances to indigenous, communal land management practices. Potential loss of irreplaceable palaeoenvironmental records through mismanaged rewilding, particularly in peatland ecosystems, poses a massive challenge (Gearey et al., 2010). Learning from this context, this project aims to integrate interdisciplinary collaboration, stakeholder engagement, and development of best-practice rewilding guidelines to reconcile ecological-cultural and archaeological integrity.