New research shows that the loss of large animals has had strong effects on ecosystem functions, and that reintroducing large animal faunas may restore biodiverse ecosystems.
Rewilding is gaining a lot of interest as an alternative conservation and land management approach in recent years, but remains controversial. It is increasingly clear that Earth harbored rich faunas of large animals -- such as elephants, wild horses and big cats -- pretty much everywhere, but that these have starkly declined with the spread of humans across the world -- a decline that continues in many areas.
A range of studies now show that these losses have had strong effects on ecosystem functions, and a prominent strain of rewilding, trophic rewilding, focuses on restoring large animal faunas and their top-down food-web effects to promote self-regulating biodiverse ecosystems.
Science for a wilder Anthropocene: Synthesis and future directions for trophic rewilding research (full PDF)
takyon: Pleistocene Park: Return of the Mammoth's Ecosystem (2005)
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday October 30 2015, @08:46AM
Hehe, that's not what I was getting at. But I think you are forgetting that modern farming is highly dependent on petroleum. So this is two things together which are of questionable sustainability. Meanwhile, California is irrigating the desert, and Climate Change could turn out to be a thing.