The role of large wild animals in climate change mitigation and adaptation

Metamicrobiome-driven homeostasis of nutrient recycling

“…Moreover, grazing can prevent fuel accumulation and therefore limit fire frequencies in seasonally dry ecosystems, reducing nutrient and carbon losses [75,76]. This adds evidence to findings that large herbivores are important in mitigating the negative impacts of climate change [77].…”

Supporting the restoration of complex ecosystems requires long‐term and multi‐scale perspectives

“…Restoring ecological processes via the restoration of keystone species holds a strong potential to increase trophic complexity and to promote species richness and community resilience in the face of rising levels of anthropogenic disturbances and climate stress (Bullock et al 2021, Storch et al 2021), while also providing climate change adaptation and mitigation benefits (Malhi et al 2022). This supports the adoption of rewilding at scale in policy and decision‐making to fulfill the goals of the post‐2020 biodiversity framework and the spirit of the declaration of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (Svenning 2020).…”

“…They propose a typology for models at different ecological levels, from genes to ecosystems, to support decision-making and guide restoration efforts at multiple scales. Dynamic models that explicitly account for time-dependent changes in the state of a system and transient dynamics are particularly suited to assist restoration planning and the upscaling of restoration efforts, not least given the strong interest in the short-term transient dynamics in restoration to assess if effects will be realized at sufficiently short time scales (Malhi et al 2022). However, such models are still underused.…”

Leveraging palaeoproteomics to address conservation and restoration agendas

“…Parallel to efforts to understand the cause of megafaunal extinctions, there is also interest in their effects. Today there is increasing appreciation for the ecological importance of megafauna ( Bakker et al., 2016 ; Malhi et al., 2022 ) and the changes to vegetation cover, ecosystem structure, biogeochemical cycling and land surface albedo that resulted from megafaunal loss ( Doughty et al., 2013 ). Efforts to restore these lost ecosystem functions have resulted in trophic rewilding projects in which locally extirpated or novel keystone species are being reintroduced ( Lorimer et al., 2015 ; Cortlett, 2016 ; Svenning et al., 2016 ).…”

“…Notably, improved understanding of past megafauna distributions and ecologies is crucial for informing on megafauna recovery potential and its ecological importance ( Monsarrat and Svenning, 2021 ), for example, in relation to large-herbivore assemblage structure ( Schowanek et al., 2021 ) and associated effects on plant migration rates ( Fricke et al., 2022 ). In addition, improving assessments of megafauna recovery potential is important for informing restoration efforts to enhance climate mitigation and adaptation ( Malhi et al., 2022 ).…”