“Rewilding is a progressive approach to conservation. It’s about letting nature take care of itself, enabling natural processes to shape land and sea, repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes. Through rewilding, wildlife’s natural rhythms create wilder, more biodiverse habitats”

- Rewilding Europe

Rewilding in essence is removal of human influence from a habitat or ecosystem to allow natural processes to resume uninterrupted. It is a highly effective conservation method used mostly on landscape scale to restore wider ecosystems in collaboration with landowners, conservation workers, and communities, to enable nature to do the work.

In Ireland however, most of our habitats are highly altered from their natural state with natural processes such as drainage, grazing, woodlands, nutrient cycles either intensively managed for human use, or altered beyond optimum functionality. The mosaic of landowners across Ireland also provides an additional challenge to rewilding ecosystems, with 100’s of acres or even entire counties worth of collaboration needed to effectively rewild an ecosystem. That is why at Allta, we opt for a Restorative approach.

Habitat restoration embodies the Rewilding ethos, but calls for a more managed approach to conservation. The goal we have is to identify priority and high value habitats and manage the adjacent landscape in collaboration with communities, landowners, charities, and industry experts to improve habitats to a point where they have the capacity and resilience to one day be Rewilded. We focus on fostering biodiversity hotspots and connecting them to others via restored corridors. Like any good team, these ecosystems cannot work in isolation. These networks will one day form the foundation for wider biodiversity enhancement across Ireland.