A new European hub, Rewilding Knowledge, is bringing together rewilding research and knowledge to bridge the gap between academia, policy and rewilding action.
Rewilding Knowledge has been developed through a collaboration between three EU Horizon projects, wildE, REWRITE, and us, WILDCARD. While Horizon projects are time-bound, the platform Rewilding Knowledge will ensure that our findings remain accessible to policymakers, land managers, and researchers long after the projects conclude.
Across Europe, a range of different management approaches and tools are enabling nature to adapt to a changing world and drive the restoration of habitats and ecosystems on land and at sea. Rewilding approaches are bringing benefits to climate and biodiversity while addressing the needs of local communities.
Rewilding Knowledge aims to advance both academic and practical understanding of how rewilding science can address the climate and biodiversity crises and support nature restoration across Europe. This research and knowledge has been developed through three rigorous Horizon Europe-funded projects, with high-quality outputs aiming to build a future where rewilding plays a key role in supporting nature restoration and climate adaptation.
By bringing together the latest curated, robust scientific evidence from trusted and reputable sources in Europe, Rewilding Knowledge ensures users can rely on the quality and credibility of the information provided.
Key features include news, blogs, a searchable resource repository featuring reports and policy guidance, videos and podcasts. More content will continue to be added as the site expands and new knowledge and research becomes available.
Built on a foundation of collaboration and connection, Rewilding Knowledge welcomes projects and initiatives from the European rewilding science community to explore opportunities for knowledge sharing and partnership.
Powered by Oppla, Rewilding Knowledge is part of a wider global knowledge network bringing together the latest research on natural capital, ecosystem services and nature-based solutions.
What happens when people leave the land, when forests return on their own, or when nature refuses to follow our expectations? Our four new episodes of WILDCARD: The Forest Game take listeners on a journey through some of Europe’s most fascinating ecological transformations, revealing how landscapes, wildlife, and even microscopic organisms are reshaping the continent’s future.
In Episode 5, Natural Reforestation in Portugal, we travel to the remote Trás-os-Montes region, where abandoned farmland is gradually becoming forest. This largely unplanned process, driven by demographic and economic change, represents one of Europe’s largest reforestation phenomena. Yet the story is far more complex than a simple return of trees. Through local voices and scientific insights, the episode explores how people, forests, and changing rural landscapes continue to interact.
Episode 6, When Nature Surprises Us: The Steppe That Refused to Become Forest, challenges one of the most common assumptions about ecological succession. After fifty years of observation, ecologist Karel Prach discovered that an abandoned field in the Czech Republic did not become forest as expected. Instead, it developed into a valuable grassland ecosystem supporting rare steppe species. The episode highlights the importance of adaptation, long-term observation, and humility when working with nature.
In Episode 7,The Invisible Architects, the focus shifts beneath our feet. Following devastating wildfires on Mount Vesuvius, researchers uncovered a hidden world of bacteria, fungi, and soil organisms that drive ecosystem recovery. These microscopic communities rebuild soil health, recycle nutrients, and create the foundations without which forests regeneration could not take place. Their work may be invisible to our eyes, but it is essential for successful rewilding.
Finally, Episode 8, Where Wolves Walk: Natural Reforestation and the Return of Wildlife, explores the dynamic relationship between regenerating forests and wildlife. As forests reconnect fragmented landscapes, animals expand into new territories, creating ecological corridors across Europe. Yet wildlife are not merely beneficiaries of restoration; they actively shape the forests themselves through browsing, seed dispersal, and predator-prey interactions. Rewilding emerges as a continuous dialogue between animals and landscapes.
Together, these four episodes reveal that rewilding is neither simple nor predictable. Forests, grasslands, wildlife, and soil organisms all play interconnected roles in shaping Europe’s future landscapes. Through compelling stories and cutting-edge science, WILDCARD: The Forest Game invites listeners to discover how nature recovers when humans step back and observe.
Produced within the WILDCARD project, the podcast combines scientific expertise with engaging storytelling to bring Europe’s rewilding revolution to life. Whether you are interested in ecology, restoration, conservation, or the future of European landscapes, these episodes offer fresh perspectives on the surprising ways nature responds to change.
Our innovative new online exhibition is inviting audiences to experience rewilding through a different lens – one shaped not by data alone, but by creativity, emotion, and shared reflection. Launched in collaboration with the Meander Magazine and the REWRITE project, the “Rewilding through Art” initiative brings together science, culture, and artistic expression in a unique virtual gallery hosted by Meander magazine: www.meandermagazine.earth/rewildingthroughart
The exhibition stems from a simple yet powerful set of questions: what does rewilding mean to individuals and communities, and how can it reshape both landscapes and mindsets? The response was striking. More than 80 submissions from artists, researchers, and citizens across 19 countries offered diverse interpretations – from ocean installations and satellite imagery to sculptures made of forest materials. A jury combining expertise from art, ecology, and environmental practice selected 12 standout works, reflecting a wide range of perspectives. While the exhibition originated as a physical installation in a forest setting in Freising, Germany, in February 2026, it now lives on through its online format, making these reflections accessible to a broader audience.
The virtual gallery highlights how art can deepen engagement with environmental issues, creating space for dialogue and new ways of seeing. Complementary to presenting rewilding as a purely scientific concept, the exhibition reveals it as a cultural and emotional process – one that reconnects people with nature and with each other.
On Rewilding Day 2026, our attention turns to WILDCARD’s Czech case study: Šumava National Park in southwestern Czechia, a landscape where nature is taking the lead. The National Park is one of Central Europe’s largest forested areas, stretching across borders with Germany and Austria.
Our new video shares insights about the history of this forest area, political and ecological objectives, and societal expectations: While some residents embrace the vision of wild forests, others see unmanaged landscapes as damaged or neglected.
Despite differing perspectives, our Czech study shows that attitudes are slowly shifting. Dialogue, experience, and exposure to regenerating areas are helping to build understanding and trust. Šumava offers a powerful reminder: rewilding is not “just” about ecosystems – it is also about people, perceptions, and the long-term vision of living with nature rather than controlling it.
Today, on the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the we celebrate the contributions of female researchers who are advancing knowledge and innovation in rewilding and ecosystem restoration across Europe.
Sara Cazzaniga, a Postdoctoral Researcher at ETH Zurich, studies the invisible yet powerful world beneath our feet: soil microbes. While rewilding often focuses on visible changes in landscapes and wildlife, Sara’s work uncovers how bacterial and fungal communities drive ecosystem recovery from the ground up. By linking below-ground microbial processes to above-ground ecological outcomes, her research helps ensure that soil biodiversity is recognized in policy and restoration strategies, providing essential evidence for informed decision-making.
Lena Lopez, a PhD researcher at the Technical University of Munich, is driven by the potential of science to catalyse coexistence between humanity and nature. As part of WILDCARD, she models land allocation scenarios for rewilding and proforestation across the European Union. Her work explores how different land-use pathways can support biodiversity while considering social and economic dimensions, contributing valuable insights for policymakers and landowners.
Lucia Seebach, a researcher at the Forestry Research Institute of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, brings a lifelong passion for environmental protection and geoecology to WILDCARD. Inspired by experiences in wild landscapes and national parks, she focuses on forests with the potential to become wild again. By accompanying natural forest development and studying ecosystem processes, Lucia’s research highlights the resilience of nature and the importance of giving ecosystems time and space to recover.
Together, Sara, Lena, and Lucia exemplify the interdisciplinary and forward-looking science at the heart of WILDCARD. Their work not only advances understanding of rewilding but also provides evidence to support sustainable land-use policies and biodiversity conservation. On this day, we proudly recognize their contributions and encourages the next generation of women and girls to pursue careers in science and environmental research.
The Rewilding Arts Initiative, coordinated with REWRITE, has received an inspiring wave of creative contributions from across Europe. A total of 84 artists from 19 different countries took part, offering a rich and diverse collection of works that reflect the growing intersection between art and ecological restoration.
The submissions span an impressive range of artworks. Paintings, drawings, and photography form the core of the collection, complemented by sculptures, videos, collages, and audio works. Together, these pieces demonstrate how artistic practice can engage with environmental themes in multiple sensory and conceptual ways, inviting audiences to experience rewilding not only as a scientific or policy-driven process but also as a cultural and emotional journey.
Many of the works explore rewilding approaches across diverse ecosystems, with a strong focus on forests and marine environments. Through visual storytelling, experimental forms, and poetic interpretations, the artists reimagine landscapes in recovery, highlight the resilience of nature, and communicate the urgency and beauty of ecological restoration. Their contributions show how art can play a crucial role in shaping public imagination, fostering empathy for natural systems, and opening up new narratives around coexistence and regeneration.
The first exhibition of selected works will take place on 24 and 25 February in a forest near Munich, as part of the upcoming Rewilding Forum. Up to ten pieces will be displayed in this immersive outdoor setting, allowing the artworks to interact directly with the natural environment they reference. Following this debut, the artworks will travel to WILDCARD’s Case Studies in 5 European countries, extending their reach to new audiences and contexts.
To further amplify these voices, the initiative will launch a dedicated social media campaign, sharing the artworks and the stories behind them with a broader public. Looking ahead, selected pieces will also be featured in the Meander Magazine in summer 2026, ensuring that the project continues to inspire conversations at the intersection of art, ecology, and rewilding.
This remarkable response from artists across Europe underscores the power of creative practice in shaping how we think about nature and restoration. The Rewilding Arts Initiative not only showcases creative excellence, but also builds a vibrant, cross-disciplinary platform where art becomes a catalyst for ecological imagination and action.
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.
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.
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.”
Imagine walking through a primeval forest – towering trees with gnarled branches, thick undergrowth, and chaotic piles of fallen branches and logs. It would also be bursting with life, from the mats of moss and lichens covering logs, to the birdsong echoing across the canopy, or the insects of all sizes buzzing around on a hot day.
Primeval forests like this are a rare sight in today’s Europe. But this is changing as ever more forests are set aside from active management, allowing nature to take the reins. We would expect to see an increase in biodiversity within these “rewilded” forests, but is that really true? This is one of the key questions the WILDCARD project is asking, and answering it will be the main goal of my research for the next couple of years. What I can already tell you is that the answer will not be as straightforward as it may seem.
Forests change over time – and so does their wildlife
Following a large disturbance or a clearing, forests will go through a series of development stages, which vary in many aspects: most obviously tree height, but also the tree species present, the vegetation layers or the deadwood volume. Many forest organisms rely on a specific combination of those features, and thus thrive only in forests at specific development stages. For example, butterfly species (such as the silver-washed fritillary, Argynnis paphia, pictured below) need sunny clearings with young vegetation for their larvae and flowers for nectar. The three-toed woodpecker (Picoides tridactylus, pictured below) and the white-backed woodpecker (Dendrocopos leucotos) instead prefer old forests with decaying trees, which they can use for nesting and foraging.
Silver-washed fritillary (Argynnis paphia), in the Black Forest (Germany). Source: João M. Cordeiro Pereira
This means letting forests develop into old age will probably not help all species – rather those adapted to older, undisturbed forests. Since traditional forestry often removes deadwood and harvests trees before they reach full maturity, these old-forest specialists are often the most threatened – and the ones most likely to benefit when we as humans step back. This is why these species will be in the center of my analyses.
Counting species is not enough
And how should biodiversity be measured? At the scale of individual forest reserves or research plots, simply measuring the number of species (the species richness) can be misleading. Within some species-rich groups, such as plants or ground beetles, most species are either generalists (using various habitat types) or depend on open habitats. Thus, over time, unmanaged forests may witness no change in species richness or even a decline, as the canopy closes up. However, this can obscure that, in fact, old-forest species of high conservation value may be recovering. That is why, in my analyses I will focus on which species appear (the community composition), rather than how many, as time goes on after management has stopped.
Eurasian three-toed woodpecker (Argynnis paphia), in the Black Forest (Germany), where this species is critically endangered at the regional level. Source: João M. Cordeiro Pereira
The hidden role of legacies and the landscape
Some species struggle to return even after a forest recovers. Why? Let us take the example of the blue ground beetle (Carabus intricatus, pictured below). This a large-bodied, flightless species, that relies on a stable forest habitat. If its environment changes, it has a limited ability to disperse in search of new habitat. If this species’ habitat in a forest patch was degraded in the past, and if this patch was too isolated from other areas with good habitat, this may have led to a local extinction of the beetle. The species would then have trouble returning, even if conditions improved. This means today’s biodiversity is not just the result of current management or the absence of it – it is also shaped by past events and how well-connected forest habitats are.
Blue ground beetle (Carabus intricatus), in the Black Forest (Germany), where this species is vulnerable both at regional and national levels. Source: Sebastian Schwegmann.
What is next?
My aim is to identify more clearly which components of forest biodiversity profit from non-intervention – and which elements may be the “blind spots” of this approach. To do this, I am working with a large amount of biodiversity data, contributed both by WILDCARD partners and external institutions (mostly in the EuFoRIa network). This data spans across multiple countries, forest types and taxonomic groups, and offers a unique opportunity to answer these questions. However, it also poses unique challenges – the data is very heterogeneous and often collected using different methodological approaches. Right now, I am working on bringing all datasets together, documenting and harmonizing them (a big job in itself!), before embarking on statistical analyses. Despite the challenges, I cannot help but feel excited to discover the stories hiding in these forests and share what I learn along the way.
