forest management

Where Europe could rewild: mapping the forests of the future

Gesche Schifferdecker and Margarita Penna on January 21, 2026

Proforestation in Germany (photo: Gesche Schifferdecker)

By Gesche Schifferdecker and Margarita Penna

Across Europe, landscapes are quietly changing. Mountain farms and pastures are being abandoned, forest management is easing in some regions, and climate and policy pressures are reshaping how land is used. For some, these trends raise concerns. For others, they open a powerful question: where could nature return, at scale, if we let it?

This is the starting point of WILDCARD’s “First iteration estimates of rewilding area and potential” (Deliverable 1.1), the project’s first EU-wide attempt to map where rewilding could realistically take place over the coming decades.

Rather than asking where rewilding should happen, this work asks a more grounded question: where is rewilding most likely to happen, given social, economic, and environmental change? The answer provides a much-needed baseline for understanding Europe’s rewilding potential – and for shaping future policy and restoration strategies.

Seeing opportunity in land-use change

Rewilding in WILDCARD is not a single process. It emerges through different pathways: when agricultural land is abandoned and forests naturally grow back; when managed forests are allowed to mature and develop more natural structures (proforestation); or a large step towards rewilding can be taken by going from intensive agricultural use to new mixed-use forests where ecological needs are explicitly addressed.

First main pathway to wilder forests in Europe: Agricultural abandonment can trigger rewilding from croplands/grasslands/mosaics toward more natural forest states, either by shifting into a combined-objective forest (some continued management alongside recovery) or by moving into close-to-nature forest through more hands-off rewilding.

Second main pathway to wilder forests in Europe: Proforestation, instead, focuses on existing forests, reducing management so plantations or multi-use stands mature into close-to-nature forests.

To capture this complexity, researchers explored eight future scenarios that reflect different development pathways for Europe. These scenarios cover both the IPCC Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and the IPBES Nature Futures Framework, ranging from business-as-usual futures to more ambitious, policy-driven nature restoration pathways. More particularly, the IPCC Shared Socioeconomic Pathwaysdescribe different ways society, economies, and governance might develop in the future, from current trends to transformative change. The IPBES Nature Futures Framework adds perspectives on how humans value and interact with nature. Together, they offer a comprehensive picture of how Europe’s landscape could evolve, visually showing how different socio-economic choices and visions of nature we prioritise can shape future land-use patterns.

At the heart of the analysis lies the CLUMondo model, a spatially explicit land-use model that simulates how land systems evolve under changing demands, policies, and biophysical conditions. The model projects land-use changes across Europe from 2020 to 2050, at a fine resolution of 1 km², allowing researchers to zoom from continental patterns down to regional detail.

Mapping Europe’s rewilding hotspots

Despite the diversity of futures explored, a striking pattern emerges from the WILDCARD work: forest recovery is an important feature in almost all scenarios.

The strongest signals appear along Europe’s major mountain systems – the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, and the Dinaric–Šar–Pindus arc – where steep terrain, lower agricultural profitability, and existing forest cover create favourable conditions for natural regeneration. These landscapes form the backbone of Europe’s potential rewilding corridors.

Different processes dominate in different regions

Proforestation is most common in areas with relatively large and not very intensively managed forests, where reduced intervention allows forests to develop toward near-natural conditions.
Agricultural abandonment and rewilding are most likely in marginal farmland, particularly in Southern and Central Europe, where retreating agriculture opens space for forest regrowth.
Combined-objective forests emerge on previously cultivated lands mainly in Central and Eastern Europe, where land is released from agriculture but remains partially managed for multiple benefits. While not rewilding per se these transitions make an important contribution to a wilder Europe.

When these processes are combined, they reveal a coherent continental picture: rewilding potential clusters in uplands and less productive landscapes, while Europe’s intensively farmed lowlands largely remain under production.

Graphic: Total rewilding probability map of Europe, representing areas with different levels of agreement across all eight land-use change scenarios. The maximum probability is reached when the conversion from croplands (arable and permanent), grasslands, mosaics and managed forests to close-to-nature forest occurs in all eight scenarios

Why policy matters

One of the most important insights comes from the “SSP2 – Planned Rewilding scenario” developed by WILDCARD researchers. Here, rewilding is not left entirely to chance. Spatially guided towards areas of potentially high ecological importance and good chances on rewilding success, policy-supported measures produce more connected and coherent forest recovery patterns than spontaneous abandonment alone. In other words, how we guide rewilding matters as much as where it happens.

These first maps do not offer final answers – and they are not meant to. Instead, they provide a continental baseline: a shared reference point for exploring trade-offs, biodiversity outcomes, and climate benefits in the next phases of WILDCARD. As future deliverables refine these scenarios and link them to ecological and social outcomes, one message is already clear: Europe’s forests of the future are taking shape now – and understanding where nature can return is the first step toward letting it thrive.

Researching the unacknowledged: A young Belgian researcher’s journey to understand the hidden world of forest soils

Rina Tsubaki on November 21, 2025

By Rina Tsubaki.

Soil might not be the first thing you notice when walking through a nearby forest. But it’s a quiet, hidden guardian that our forests depend on. It connects trees, insects, and fungi in ways we often overlook. Many soil organisms feed on dead plant residues, making important nutrients available to plants. Additionally, while feeding and digging, they incorporate organic carbon into the soil, improving soil structure and water holding capacity. Healthy, biodiverse soil is therefore essential for making forests resilient and multifunctional and cannot be ignored by anyone working in sustainable forest management.

Rewilding in Three Dimensions: What LiDAR Reveals About Forests

Kamil Kral on September 4, 2025

By Kamil Kral.

When I walk through a forest, I am always struck by the sense that there is more happening than I can perceive. My eyes trace the trunks of trees, the canopy stretching above me, and the shafts of light breaking through in places. But I also know that much of the forest remains hidden from my view. Forests are not some layers of vegetation; they are complex, three-dimensional worlds. They grow upward, outward, and in intricate layers, creating habitats within habitats. To truly understand how these structures form and evolve, we need tools that go beyond what our senses and traditional methods can capture. That is where LiDAR comes in, and why it has become such a powerful part of our work in the WILDCARD project.

LiDAR – Light Detection and Ranging – allows us to map forests in three dimensions at centimetre-to-metre resolution. By sending out laser pulses and measuring how they reflect, LiDAR creates an extraordinarily detailed picture of vegetation structure. From airplanes, it can cover entire landscapes, but in WILDCARD we focus mainly on ground-based and drone-mounted systems. These cover smaller areas, yet their precision is remarkable, revealing the layers of the understory, the openings in the canopy where light filters through, the presence of exceptionally large trees, and the way these elements combine into complex arrangements across a site. What excites me most is how LiDAR connects many different domains: a single dataset links the technical world of remote sensing with ecological research and the very practical sphere of management and policy. It shows us what remains invisible to aerial photographs and ground surveys – the fine-grained complexity of the understory, the architecture of the canopy, and the shifting patterns of light and space that drive ecological processes. And what truly matters is not just capturing these patterns but translating them into indicators that reflect biodiversity, turning three-dimensional point clouds (the reflections of laser beams emitted by the scanners) into ecological meaning.

*Drone pilot Bára Kobosilová ready for the start at Jansheideberg site, Belgium. Picture: Dan Cigánek*

For rewilding, this information is crucial. Rewilding is not just about leaving land unmanaged and hoping for the best. It is also about letting natural processes unfold and observing how they gradually create new ecological opportunities. LiDAR allows us to measure these changes. By comparing sites of different ages and management histories – what we call a space-for-time substitution or chronosequence – we can track how complexity develops once human interventions stop. Over decades, forests shift in structure, forming vertical layers, creating gaps, and offering niches for species that depend on a dynamic habitat. These transformations are difficult to capture with traditional field plots, which often rely on sampling a small number of trees or features. LiDAR, on the other hand, gives us a comprehensive picture and a repeatable way to observe these changes across dozens or even hundreds of sites.

With LiDAR, we can start to ask why forests behave the way they do. Why do carbon accumulation and biodiversity often rise together in some places, while in others the two seem to diverge? How does structure influence species composition? And how might we use this knowledge to guide rewilding in ways that support both climate goals and biodiversity? These are questions that matter deeply, not only to scientists but to policymakers, land managers, and communities who want to see landscapes recover.

*Pictures: Bára Kobosilová and Dan Ciganek*

From our pilot sites we already have encouraging results. We have built a robust processing pipeline and developed a first set of structural indicators. The early patterns are striking: rewilded stands seem to show higher levels of both vertical and horizontal complexity than managed stands. These structural differences are precisely the kinds of features that many species depend on, and we anticipate strong correlations with independent measures of biodiversity. At the same time, we are grappling with real challenges. Data collected from different sensors and platforms do not always align neatly, and we need to harmonise them to ensure comparability. We are also learning about the limits of scale – how small a plot can be before its complexity becomes too difficult to measure reliably. These are technical hurdles, but they are also stepping stones that will allow us to expand our analysis across the entire WILDCARD network.

For me, the most exciting aspect of this work is its potential to shift how we think about rewilding. Forests are often described as carbon sinks or as habitats for species, but the WILDCARD project reveals them as both at once: living, evolving, complex three-dimensional systems. With the LiDAR technology we can not only see but also measure the richness of their structure and begin to understand how it shapes biodiversity and carbon dynamics together. That knowledge can inform rewilding strategies, guide conservation investments, and support policies that build resilient ecosystems. Forests are more than collections of trees. They are dynamic, intricate habitats that we are only beginning to understand in full. LiDAR gives us a way to step into that complexity, to capture it with unprecedented precision, and to tell the story of rewilding in three dimensions. For WILDCARD, it means we are one step closer to making the so far hidden patterns measurable, and to building the knowledge that will help rewilding succeed at scales that truly matter.

Where the Bison Roam Again: Rewilding in Vânători Neamț Nature Park

Santiago Alarcón on June 20, 2025

In the quiet forests of Northeastern Romania, near the town of Suceava, a remarkable rewilding story is unfolding.

This short film takes us into the heart of Vânători Neamț Nature Park, where the European bison, once extinct in the wild, is once again roaming free. The journey began in the 1970s, when the first bison were brought to Romania by the National Forest Administration. But it wasn’t until 2003, with support from a World Bank project, that the dream of rewilding took real shape, with infrastructure built and the first animals arriving in the park.

By 2012, the first five bison were released into the wild. Since then, more have followed, year after year, slowly rebuilding a population that had vanished. But this isn’t just about restoring a species. It’s about restoring balance between open fields and forest, between people and nature.

The European bison is more than a keystone species. It’s a national symbol, deeply woven into Romanian and Moldavian heritage. Its presence now supports local economies, from eco-tourism to traditional crafts, and fulfills important EU conservation goals.

And while the term “rewilding” may be new to some, the idea isn’t. As Laura Bouriaud from the Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava says, “we are living with nature. Even if we didn’t put this name on it, rewilding is part of our life.”

Europe’s Forest Bounty: The Rising Role of Non-Timber Forest Products in Sustainable Development

Giorgio Alberti on March 19, 2025

By Giorgio Alberti.

As Europe’s forests expand, a growing treasure trove of natural resources is emerging—one that extends far beyond traditional timber. Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) are gaining recognition as a vital economic, social, and environmental asset across the European Union. From edible fruits and mushrooms to medicinal herbs and resins, these resources support local economies, sustain traditions, and enhance biodiversity. Yet, despite their importance, clear guidelines for their collection and trade remain absent from EU policies, raising concerns about their sustainable management.

A Growing Opportunity

Europe’s forest coverage has surged by 30% since the 1950s, driven largely by socio-economic shifts such as agricultural land abandonment. As farming declines in marginal areas, forests—both natural and artificially planted—have reclaimed the landscape. In parallel, forest management strategies are evolving, with many regions shifting away from intensive timber production toward conservation-focused approaches, known as “proforestation”. We also investigate this rewilding approach in the WILDCARD project, where we for example investigate how biodiversity below and aboveground develops after the abandonment of forest management (more info here).

This transformation described above is unlocking new opportunities for rural communities. As abandoned farmland returns to nature, an abundance of wild foods, medicinal plants, and other valuable forest products becomes available. Moreover, proforestation encourages the accumulation of deadwood, creating ideal conditions for mushrooms and other fungi to thrive. The resurgence of long-forgotten plant species further enhances the diversity and economic potential of these landscapes.

Economic and Cultural Revival

For many rural and forest-dependent communities, NTFPs already provide a crucial source of income, particularly where large-scale timber production is not viable. Small-scale farmers, foragers, and local businesses benefit from the collection, processing, and sale of these natural goods, offering an alternative to traditional agricultural economies.

Beyond financial gains, the resurgence of NTFPs fosters a cultural revival. Many of these products have deep roots in traditional medicine, cuisine, and folklore. Their renewed presence in forests is helping to reconnect people with their natural heritage. Ecotourism is also flourishing, as activities like guided foraging tours, wildflower picking, and educational walks focused on medicinal plants attract visitors eager to engage with nature in a meaningful way.

Policy Gaps and Future Challenges

Despite their increasing importance, NTFPs remain an underregulated sector. While key EU policies such as the EU Forest Strategy, the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) acknowledge the value of these resources, there is little guidance on sustainable collection and trade. Without clear regulations, the risk of overexploitation looms, which can threaten the long-term availability of these products and the ecosystems that support them.

A Path Forward

To fully realize the potential of NTFPs, the EU must develop comprehensive policies that balance economic opportunity with conservation. Guidelines for sustainable harvesting, certification systems, and incentives for local businesses could help ensure that these resources remain abundant for future generations. As Europe’s forests continue to evolve, so too does the relationship between people and nature. By embracing a closer-to-nature approach and fostering a diversified forest economy, NTFPs can serve as a bridge between conservation and rural development—proving that forests offer far more than just timber.