They suggest it could be possible to put gray wolves in Olympic National Park in Washington and sending endangered red wolves, which once roamed the southeast, into Everglades National Park. Their paper mentions just two specific reintroduction sites where rewilding would likely work out as planned. Their results, published Wednesday in Royal Society Open Science, suggest that with proper attention and care to ensure these carnivores' survival, rewilding programs could restore lost ecosystems worldwide.Д«ut it won't be as simple as finding a dot on a map. Their analysis revealed 130 potential sites suitable for rewilding and an additional 150 spotsВ with little human activity to consider preserving. They focused on big places with small human footprints, available prey and buffer zones where animals may traverse safely. So, Ripple and Christopher Wolf, a postdoctoral researcher in his lab, analyzed hundreds of potential rewilding sites from a database of protected areas around the planet where large carnivores have disappeared. Recently, scientists and conservationists have been hoping that rewilding will result in ecological benefits like those seen with gray wolves. Extinction and declining populations threaten most of them. Lions and tigers and bears - along with gray wolves and 21 other species of large, terrestrial carnivores roam this planet.

Nearly half of carnivore reintroductions fail, and understanding where rewilding may or may not work is critical to getting it right. He's found that if you rewild some carnivores, or return them back to lost ranges, a cascade of ecological bounty may follow.Д«ut not always. 'We're just uncovering these effects of large carnivores at the same time their populations are declining and are at risk,' said William Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University. With more trees controlling erosion, the flows of some rivers were less chaotic, forming pools that became new habitats. The wolves ate coyotes, freeing up their prey for others. Birds and beavers, as well as the animals that live in dams, also returned. In the places where they returned, wolves tidied up explosive deer and elk populations, which had eaten valleys barren. Since their reintroduction to Yellowstone and Idaho in the 1990s, gray wolves have done so well that they're reclaiming other parts of the northern Rockies. Poisonings and unregulated hunting obliterated nearly all of these majestic canines from Canada to Mexico, their original home range. But a century ago, you'd have been hard pressed to find any there. If you're lucky, you can spot a gray wolf in Yellowstone National Park. (John and Karen Hollingsworth/United States Fish and Wildlife Service via The New York Times) The gray wolfвЂ™s reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s has been a success story of a carnivoreвЂ™s rewilding helping an entire ecosystem.

Carnivores in the everglades