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.