Posters - 2024

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  Rewilding the Danube Delta; How Rewilding can revitalize ecosystems and restore biomes

  Antonio Martinez

  The Danube Delta and the surrounding area harbors a variety of ecosystems and biodiversity from Romania to Ukraine. The 580,000-hectare delta is particularly well known for its abundance of birdlife, with the presence of 312 important bird species, many of which use the Delta as an important stopover and breeding area such as the Dalmatian Pelican (UNESCO et al.,1998). Here, also lie some of Europe’s very few remaining grazed mosaic landscapes, the beautiful wetlands. The delta region includes extensive examples of unaltered rivers, lakes, reed beds, marshes, steppes, dunes, sandbars, coasts, lagoons, salt marshes and climax forests (Rewilding Europe n.d.).This degrading landscape use to harbor large grazers such as the water bison, the Kulan, and the Red deer which helped maintain the area and help keep stabilization across the ecosystem. However, these large grazers have faced population decline and extinction over the centuries resulting in the destabilization of the biome. Although, extinctions are naturally occurring events that drive evolution and allow the earth to adapt to change. Five mass extinction events have occurred throughout our planet’s history, and scientists now believe we are entering our sixth. What makes this time different, however, is the fact that extinctions are occurring hundreds of times faster than usual because of human activity (Jaxx et al., 2021). Thankfully, scientists have implemented a number of solutions to protect wildlife and restore ecological communities. One of these is called rewilding (Jaxx et al., 2021). Without continuous rewilding efforts, the Danube delta is set for drastic decline in the upcoming decades. To mitigate this environmental loss, it is vital for rewilding efforts to continue in the delta and to bring conservation to areas that are prone to suffer from anthropic activity.