Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, Regent's Park, NW1 4RY, London, UK; Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, South Kensington, SW7 2AZ, London, UK.
School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QG, UK; Sussex Sustainability Research Programme (SSRP), University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QG, UK.
J Environ Manage. 2022 Jun 15;312:114867. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.114867. Epub 2022 Apr 1.
Rewilding is increasingly considered as an option for environmental regeneration, with potential for enhancing both biodiversity and ecosystem services. So far, however, there is little practical information on how to gauge the benefits and limitations of rewilding schemes on ecosystem composition, structure and functioning. To address this knowledge gap, we explored how satellite remote sensing can contribute to informing the monitoring and evaluation of rewilding projects, using the Knepp estate as a case study. To our knowledge, this study is the first to assess the impacts of rewilding as an ecological regeneration strategy on landscape structure and functioning over several decades. Results show significant changes in land cover distribution over the past 20 years inside rewilded areas in the Knepp estate, with a 41.4% decrease in areas with brown agriculture and grass, a roughly sixfold increase in areas covered with shrubs, and a 40.9% increase in areas with trees; vegetation in the rewilded areas also showed a widespread increase in annual primary productivity. Changes in land cover and primary productivity are particularly pronounced in the part of the estate that began its rewilding journey with a period of large herbivore absence. Altogether, our approach clearly demonstrates how freely available satellite data can (1) provide vital insights about long-term changes in ecosystem composition, structure and functioning, even for small, heterogeneous and relatively intensively used landscapes; and (2) help deepen our understanding of the impacts of rewilding on vegetation distribution and dynamics, in ways that complement existing ground-based studies on the impacts of this approach on ecological communities.
重新引入野生动物被越来越多地视为环境再生的一种选择，具有提高生物多样性和生态系统服务的潜力。然而，迄今为止，关于如何评估重新引入野生动物计划对生态系统组成、结构和功能的益处和限制，几乎没有实际信息。为了解决这一知识差距，我们以 Knepp 庄园为例，探讨了卫星遥感如何有助于为重新引入野生动物项目的监测和评估提供信息。据我们所知，这项研究首次评估了重新引入野生动物作为一种生态再生策略对景观结构和功能的影响，历时几十年。研究结果表明，在过去 20 年里，Knepp 庄园的重新引入野生动物区域内的土地覆盖分布发生了显著变化，棕色农业和草地面积减少了 41.4%，灌木覆盖面积增加了约六倍，树木覆盖面积增加了 40.9%；重新引入野生动物区域的植被年初级生产力也普遍增加。在庄园的一部分，土地覆盖和初级生产力的变化尤为明显，这部分庄园在重新引入野生动物之前经历了一段时间的大型食草动物缺失。总之，我们的方法清楚地表明，免费卫星数据（1）如何能够提供有关生态系统组成、结构和功能的长期变化的重要见解，即使是对于小型、异质和相对密集使用的景观；（2）有助于加深我们对重新引入野生动物对植被分布和动态的影响的理解，以补充现有关于这种方法对生态群落影响的基于地面的研究。
