5. How can whole-of-community rewilding aid conservation?
Although the emphasis of whole-of-community rewilding often falls on reinstating function (Table 1), it may play a valuable role in future conservation efforts. For example, the alarming rate at which invertebrates are declining worldwide has only recently received public attention (Eisenhauer, 2019), with some estimating populations of terrestrial invertebrates are declining roughly 9% per decade (van Klink et al. , 2020). Although there are risks associated with whole-of-community rewilding, this underutilised method for restoring communities can provide a way to rapidly improve biodiversity, bypassing the slow method of species-by-species reintroductions found in current rewilding projects. Evidence for this can be found in the most common form of whole-of-community rewilding, topsoil inoculation studies. Transplants of whole soil communities can improve the biodiversity and density of mites and springtails (Wubs et al. , 2016; van der Bijet al. , 2018), the abundance of wetland macroinvertebrates (Brown, Smith and Batzer, 1997), soil nematode abundance (Benetkováet al. , 2020), and soil macrofauna abundance (Moradi et al. , 2018). Similarly, Haase and Pilotto, (2019) noted that their method of rewilding whole communities of stream invertebrates introduced 45 taxa from remnant streams that were absent in partially restored recipient streams.