Rewilding Europe: Returning Wolves, Bison, and Wilderness to the Continent

Europe's Forests Are Coming Back — Because Humans Are Leaving Them

Europe has lost more than 50% of its forest cover since the peak of agricultural expansion in the 19th century, but a countervailing trend has emerged: rural depopulation. An estimated 700,000 square kilometers of European farmland — an area slightly larger than France — were abandoned between 1950 and 2010 as agricultural consolidation, urbanization, and demographic shifts emptied the countryside across Central and Eastern Europe. Into this abandonment, rewilding organizations have moved — not to plant forests or manage habitats in the traditional conservationist sense, but to step back and allow ecological processes to reassert themselves, sometimes with the reintroduction of species whose absence has suppressed those processes.

Rewilding is conservation by subtraction.

What Rewilding Means: Process Over Management

Rewilding differs fundamentally from conventional conservation in its philosophy. Traditional conservation often aims to maintain a specific managed state — a particular grassland composition, a set bird density, a defined habitat mosaic. Rewilding, as articulated by conservation biologist George Monbiot in his 2013 book Feral and operationalized by organizations like Rewilding Europe and the Rewilding Britain charity, aims to restore ecological processes — particularly the interactions among trophic levels — and then reduce human management over time as those processes become self-sustaining.

Three components define most rewilding programs:

• Core area protection: Securing sufficient land area — typically thousands to tens of thousands of hectares — from intensive human use to allow ecosystem processes to function at meaningful scale.
• Species reintroduction: Restoring missing components of the food web, particularly apex predators and large herbivores, that regulate vegetation structure, prey populations, and nutrient cycling.
• Reduced human intervention: Progressively withdrawing active management as ecological processes begin self-organizing, allowing the system to move toward a natural dynamic rather than a managed steady state.

Rewilding Europe: The Organization and Its Reach

Rewilding Europe was founded in 2011 by Frans Vera (Netherlands), Wouter Helmer (Netherlands), Mauro Belardi (Italy), and Simon Appelqvist (Sweden). As of 2024, the organization operates in 10 rewilding landscapes across Europe, spanning approximately 3 million hectares of target rewilding area in Portugal, Spain, Romania, Croatia, Sweden, Ukraine, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the Carpathian Mountains region.

The Trophic Cascade Effect

The scientific basis for prioritizing predator reintroduction in rewilding is the trophic cascade — the indirect, cascading effect that apex predators exert on vegetation structure by controlling herbivore behavior and density. The best-documented example is the 1995 gray wolf reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park, which triggered a chain of ecological changes studied by William Ripple and Robert Beschta: wolves reduced elk populations and, more importantly, changed elk spatial behavior (avoiding river valleys where wolves could trap them), allowing riverside vegetation to recover, stream banks to stabilize, beaver populations to return, and stream morphology to change.

European rewilding programs draw on this framework. In areas of Carpathian Romania where wolf packs hunt, deer behavioral pressure on forest regeneration has measurably decreased — allowing young trees to establish in areas previously grazed bare. In the Côa Valley of Portugal, where wild horses and Iberian deer have been introduced to abandoned agricultural terraces, grassland-woodland mosaics are developing without human mowing schedules.

The European Bison's Comeback

The European bison (Bison bonasus) is the success story that anchors European rewilding's public narrative. The species went extinct in the wild in 1927, with the last wild individual shot in the Białowieża Forest (on the Polish-Belarusian border) by a poacher. A captive breeding program operating from the handful of surviving zoo individuals — 12 founders — produced the entire modern population. As of 2024, approximately 7,200 European bison exist, with populations established in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Russia, Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia, and Germany. The IUCN downlisted the species from Vulnerable to Near Threatened in 2020 — one of the few large mammal species to improve its Red List status in recent decades.

Rewilding Europe's bison program has established free-roaming herds in the Southern Carpathians of Romania, where animals released between 2012 and 2023 have formed a self-sustaining population exceeding 200 individuals — the largest free-ranging bison population in Western and Central Europe outside Białowieża.

Wolf and Lynx Recovery Without Active Reintroduction

Not all rewilding success stories involve deliberate reintroduction. The gray wolf (Canis lupus) recolonized Germany naturally from Poland in 2000, establishing its first German breeding pack in recorded modern history in Saxony. As of 2024, Germany hosts more than 200 wolves in approximately 160 packs — a recovery driven by legal protection under the EU Habitats Directive and the natural dispersal of individuals from expanding Polish and Czech populations. The same pattern of natural recolonization has occurred in France (wolves from Italy since 1992, now 1,000+ individuals), the Netherlands (first confirmed breeding 2019), and Belgium (first pack 2018).

• Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) reintroduced to Switzerland (1971), Germany (1970s), France (1970s–1990s), and Slovenia have established connected metapopulations across the Alps-Jura-Vosges corridor.
• Brown bear reintroductions in the French Pyrenees (1996, 2006) have produced a small but reproducing population now exceeding 100 individuals.
• White-tailed eagles (Haliaeetus albicilla), reintroduced to the UK by Scotland's RSPB (1975) and to England by Natural England (2019), have established breeding pairs in multiple regions after centuries of absence.

Conflicts and Limitations

Rewilding in Europe generates consistent conflicts between conservation goals and agricultural interests. Wolf depredation on livestock is the most politically charged issue: a single wolf pack can kill dozens of sheep, goats, or cattle annually, generating intense opposition in pastoral communities across France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Romania. Compensatory payment schemes exist in most EU countries, but administrative delays, proof-of-depredation requirements, and cultural hostility toward apex predators create ongoing friction.

Land tenure is the structural limitation. Most of Europe's countryside is privately owned, and rewilding at meaningful scale requires either purchasing land, long-term lease agreements with willing landowners, or EU agri-environment policy instruments that pay farmers to reduce management intensity. Rewilding Europe estimates that achieving measurable biodiversity recovery across its 10 landscapes requires securing approximately 7 million hectares of land under rewilding agreements — a target that requires sustained financial and political investment beyond what any single conservation organization can provide.