The Global Rewilding Alliance and OpenForests have officially launched a map of rewilding projects around the world.
Organizations have contributed stories, photos and videos for projects in 70 countries covering 1 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles), and the alliance’s leaders say more will be added.
Rewilding is a type of ecological restoration that aims to restore natural dynamics and processes to ecosystems.
Proponents of the approach say it has the potential to address both biodiversity loss and climate change.
In the past decade, the European bison (Bison bonasus) has made a comeback in Central and Eastern Europe. Hunters had killed the last known bison in the region nearly a century ago. But thanks to reintroduction programs in Belarus, Poland, Russia and Romania, nearly four times as many bison are alive today as there were in 2003. The increase, to some 7,000 animals, was enough to prompt the IUCN to downgrade the European bison’s conservation status from vulnerable to near threatened in 2020.
