2022 Messerer, Georg: Assessing the Rewilding Scores of German National Parks

The current UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration supports and has called for ambitious actions to not just halt biodiversity loss but to restore the ecosystems that have been lost until 2030. Rewilding is a highly appropriate approach to apply to this challenge. With minimal human interventions, natural processes and dynamics at its core, it drives the recovery of self-sustaining ecosystems in the long term.
In order to scale up rewilding across Europe, it is crucial to have a solid, science-based methodology to monitor the progress at site-level. In the present work, the rewilding scores of five national parks in Germany have been quantified following an expert-based rewilding progres assessment proposed by Torres et al. (2018) and calibrated by Segar et al. (2021).

As expected, all National Parks showed a positive increase in their rewilding scores after the initial interventions upon designation. This work has shown that even with strict limitations to time and human resources, as is often the reality in rewilding areas, the practicality and cost-effectiveness of this monitoring method holds true.

While the five national parks struggle to increase some of the indicators quantifying for the ecological integrity of their area, due to the reality of the regional contexts, the legal framework has shown considerable effects on the reduction of human forcing to the systems across all sites. This is a powerful opportunity for national parks to build upon and become reference points for rewilding in Germany and Europe.