Post #652373

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sflorg/116176564198249824 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: https://www.sflorg.com/2026/03/eco03052601.html I asked an author for an uploaded PDF so might post a link to that later. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.70325 edit: free pdf https://www.researchgate.net/publication/401563116_Black_Death_Land_Abandonment_Drove_European_Diversity_Losses 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