Strategies for Creating Effective National Restoration Plans

This policy document outlines how National Restoration Plans can be designed to support ecosystem recovery through concrete, sector-specific measures. It frames rewilding as a holistic form of ecological restoration that restores natural processes rather than relying only on narrow habitat interventions. The document provides practical sub-measures for multiple ecosystem types and management contexts. For freshwater and floodplain systems, it recommends removing obsolete barriers such as dams and weirs, demolishing dykes and embankments to allow polders to flood, improving groundwater connectivity, keeping flood zones free of buildings, establishing river development corridors, and creating habitats through morphological improvements. For scavenger and carrion-based food webs, it suggests minimum management and veterinary treatment and avoiding medicines that could harm scavengers, while leaving carcasses in the field where appropriate to support scavenging and nutrient cycling. For herbivore-driven landscapes, it recommends supporting pastoralism or eco-grazing where compatible, enabling the passive return of wild herbivores through habitat restoration and barrier removal, and reintroducing wild herbivores or semi-wild domestic analogues such as hardy horses and cattle to restore missing ecological functions. The document also covers reintroduction of keystone and ecosystem-engineer species, including restocking necrophagous birds, allowing carcass disposal in nature under proper protocols, and reintroducing prey species to sustain predators and scavengers. Its strength is that it connects policy planning to implementable restoration actions across hydrology, grazing, trophic interactions, and species reintroduction. For practitioners, it functions as a bridge between legislation and on-the-ground restoration design, helping translate national planning into site-level measures that support biodiversity, resilience, and long-term ecosystem function.