Open KE Fellowship: Developing best-practice for natural process restoration in the British uplands

The EU and UK Biodiversity Strategies have set ambitious goals of halting the decline in biodiversity and restoring ecosystems to maximise the services nature provides society by 2020. This Open NERC Knowledge Exchange Fellowship will help policy-makers and practitioners achieve these goals by producing best-practice guidelines for upland natural process restoration or 'rewilding'. This will be achieved by bringing together a network of primarily NERC funded academics, with practitioners, policy-makers, professional bodies and businesses to exchange knowledge and experience. Success will help safe guard natural heritage for future generations, alleviate major national challenges such as flooding and water quality, and provide more resilient rural communities and economies. Rewilding is an emerging approach within inter-disciplinary conservation science. It is proposed as a complementary method to established biodiversity conservation by re-establishing natural processes to allow ecosystems to restore and sustain themselves. Where successful it will deliver a sustainable and cost-effective approach to conservation by reducing the recurrent costs associated with direct management.

The overall aim of this Knowledge Exchange fellowship is to facilitate the restoration of naturally functioning upland ecosystems in Britain. The uplands are an important starting point because the impacts of actions here cascade down through river catchments with the flow of water, sediments and nutrients. The critical, overarching, natural processes considered for restoration will be predation, herbivory, disturbance and hydrology. The key objectives are: 1) to bring together academics, practitioners, policy makers and businesses in three workshops to co-produce best-practice guidelines to inform policy on natural process restoration; and 2) to disseminate these guidelines through direct engagement with stakeholders and through the creation of an online platform of resources.

Rewilding Britain is a UK charity that aspires to see habitats expand, wildlife multiply, and communities flourish with new opportunities. An important ambition for Rewilding Britain is to work with the academic community to collate, synthesise and disseminate the best available research to their partners, government bodies, landowners and the public. They wish to use this collaboration to create and maintain an online 'Rewilding Knowledge Hub' to engage stakeholders and the public.

While rewilding presents an exciting opportunity, it currently lacks a specific evidence base to properly assess its feasibility, value, risks and associated costs. There is, however, a considerable amount of relevant fundamental and applied conservation, ecology, ecohydrology, and socio-economics research that could aid the development of rewilding policy and best-practice. NERC has been an integral funder of much of this research. This Knowledge Exchange project will collate and synthesise the research of academic partners including Prof. Y. Malhi, Prof. D.W. Macdonald, Prof. W. Sutherland, Prof. R. Brazier, Prof. A. Newton, Dr. S. Carver, Dr. P. Jepson, and the applicant Dr. C.J. Sandom.

This synthesised knowledge will serve as a primer for a two-way knowledge exchange with the project's practical and policy partners through two workshops on the approaches, value, risks and costs of rewilding. A third workshop will be dedicated to co-produce best-practice guidelines for natural process restoration. Project partners include Rewilding Britain, John Muir Trust, Wild Europe, Woodland Trust, and Conservation Capital. Through stakeholder engagement and the development of best-practice guidelines, land managers will be able to identify and select appropriate cost-effective actions to reinstate upland natural processes as a result of this project. This will result in nature-based socio-economic development in the uplands that cascades downstream with the flow of water.