Unmanaged rewilding >of a previously human-controlled environment< indeed decreases biodiversity even further.
The animals required for ensuring a good mix of open woodland, meadows, and forest don't exist anymore. And so, a natural rewilding of such post-human land leads to shrub-dominated flora.
It takes quite a while for this to change into a balanced and diverse flora and fauna.
Longer still for rewilding of a post-civilisation, climate-change_impacted region.
Good writeup of a paywalled paper:
sflorg.com/2026/03/eco03052601…
I asked an author for an uploaded PDF so might post a link to that later. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10…
The Black Death pandemic from 1347ff is not a blueprint however for what's in store for European post-civilisation landscapes.
The pre-pandemic population of the whole continent was only 60 mio people, that is today's UK population.
So their #landuse was much, much smaller. Forests still were home to wolf packs and bears, one of the prerequisites for a healthy #biodiversity.
Another thing I'd like to get an answer for: how much does the water cycle change with rewilding, ie with shrub-ification?
Will a post-civilisation East-Germany and Poland still turn into dry steppe as projected for >1.5°C?
Or will the shrub-ification counter this climate change impact by increasing cloud-nuclei and rain amounts?
#RCPcollapse #BlackDeath #Hydrology #ClimateChange #Biodiversity
#Plant #biodiversity significantly declined in Europe following the massive human population loss and subsequent agricultural abandonment caused by the Black Death.
#Paleoecology #Ecology #Environmental #Conservation #sflorg
sflorg.com/2026/03/eco03052601…Black Death ‘Rewilding’ Did Not Boost Biodiversity
Many modern environmental theories suggest that human activity is inherently damaging to biodiversity,www.sflorg.com
