Evaluating Trophic Rewilding as a Conservation Technique

The focus for this paper is to define specifically trophic rewilding, determine its efficacy as a conservation technique, and explore ways to lessen one of its key limitations. Trophic rewilding is the conservation technique whereby an extirpated keystone species or ecosystem engineer is reintroduced into a degraded habitat to restore ecological function by triggering trophic cascades. The technique is evaluated through analysis of the concepts of trophic cascades and ecosystem engineers. Key limitations of trophic rewilding are that a lack of population control in reintroduced may cause issues, that many times not enough is known about trophic cascades to be effective at creating a rewilding model, and the most frequently stated and largest limitation of rewilding is negative human-wildlife conflicts. Attempts to limit human-animal conflict are then explored and a experiment is proposed to further understand public perception of trophic rewilding