How an Iberian rewilding plan aims to repopulate ‘empty Spain’

[ZoomBubba]

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Once covered by large herds of sheep, decades of land abandonment and depopulation have earned the area, more than five times the size of Greater London, the name of “empty Spain”. Today, fewer than two people per square kilometre live in these highlands.

Low levels of human disturbance have allowed the return of fallow, roe and red deer – which can be spotted grazing at sunset – and the largest population of Egyptian vultures in Europe. Rewilding Spain’s wildlife recovery scheme is focusing on reintroducing large herbivores and predators, such as the black vulture and Iberian lynx, which once inhabited the land.

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Restoring natural grazing will help improve biodiversity and regenerate the soil, says Pablo Schapira, the initiative’s team leader. Years of intensive grazing by livestock treated with antibiotics and antiparasitics have killed off dung beetles, for example, which help bring nutrients back into the soil.

Elsewhere, semi-wild Serrano horses, an endangered local breed, and a herd of tauros, cattle back-bred to resemble aurochs, an extinct wild bovine species, have been released.

By eating long grass and shrubs, the grazers have another critical role to play: they reduce the forest’s biomass which is potential fuel for fires. “We are facing a new generation of fires that are so big they are changing the temperature of the environment and are nearly impossible to stop,” says Schapira.

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The Alto Tajo national park is crossed by the Tagus River, one of the most pristine in Europe and the longest on the Iberian peninsula, rising from the mountains in Montes Universales and meeting the Atlantic Ocean in Lisbon.

A proposal to create a national park around parts of the deep gorges carved by the river’s flow could elevate nature protection to the highest level in Spain. The designation would ban hunting, fishing and logging in an area of up to 40,000 hectares, but allow traditional forms of agriculture to continue.

Despite bipartisan political support, the proposal has encountered resistance. Hunting, although in decline, remains a main source of income for local people and municipalities which own many of the hunting concessions.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/07/iberian-rewilding-project-aims-repopulate-empty-spain?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1

Kind of related to the post about the cultured meat from the other day. That combined with many states losing population and lower birthrates overall makes me hopeful we can see something like this in the next few decades in the U.S.
 

[Top Gun]

That's really cool, but who let the Pokemon nerd name the project?