Rewilding Futures: Shaping Tomorrow's Wild

Large herbivores have historically shaped vegetation by maintaining open areas and disturbing woody habitats. However, the large herbivores alive today represent only a fraction of those present before modern humans. The extinction of many species over the past 50,000 years, including megaherbivores (>1000 kg) before the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, likely altered vegetation structure and composition. In this session, Dr Elena Pearce will present her research into how the loss of megafauna affected Europe’s temperate forests. Using the latest vegetation reconstruction approach, she analysed pollen records from the Last Interglacial (129,000–116,000 BP), before widespread megafauna declines and human-driven landscape changes. Her findings reveal open vegetation and light woodland exceeded 50% cover, with marked spatial variation driven more by disturbance regimes—likely linked to megafauna—than climate. These results challenge the view of dense, closed-canopy temperate forests, highlighting the role of megafauna in maintaining diverse, open ecosystems and supporting Europe’s historical biodiversity.