Rewilding Futures: Shaping Tomorrow's Wild

This workshop, to be facilitated by David Noble, Adham Ashton-Butt and Gavin Siriwardena of BTO, together with Sahran Higgins of Rewilding Britain, will focus on approaches to assessing the success of rewilding projects from a biodiversity perspective, whether specific targets or open-ended. To ensure funding, to promote rewilding elsewhere and for concrete evidence to engage wider audiences, robust monitoring data is critical. This requires the use of scientifically sound and repeatable protocols on-site, with relevant counterfactuals. Drawing on UK and European examples, the workshop will cover the pros and cons of (i) bespoke surveys using citizen science, or professionals, (ii) making use of existing monitoring data, and (iii) emerging technologies including passive acoustic monitoring. Talks on the strengths and weaknesses of approaches, scientific, logistical, and dependencies (volunteer capacity, broader data availability and taxa) will be followed by a Q&A. We will invite contributions of real-world monitoring targets (what do we need to know?) and suggestions for monitoring approaches (what works best?). The output will be a guidance document for monitoring.