Yakutia

The Yakutia Wilderness is envisioned along the East Siberian Arctic coast and upon the off shore islands. It would stretch east from beyond the Lena River Delta on the west to the Kalyma River in the east - approximately 1500 kilometers. The included lands are primarily mossy tundra, rising into mountains to the south. Natural corridors would connect this great wilderness to tundra to the west and east and to the boreal forest to the south.

This wilderness is visualized as a home for a wide assortment of megafauna that can thrive in an arctic environment - similar to the Pleistocene Park envisioned by Sergey A. Zimov and described in a 2005 Science article. Beside wildlife currently extant in these lands, the wilderness would include representatives of pleistocene fauna found elsewhere as well as recreations of extinct megafauna such as the woolly mammoth and woolly rhinocerous.

The table below lists wildlife inhabitants proposed to act as stand-ins for Pleistocene creatures that are now extinct. The modern representatives are either closely related genetically or would play a similar ecological role.

Click chart below and expand to make readable.

Most symbolic of these now extinct animals is the Woolly Mammoth, dwarf representatives of which survived on Wrangel Island for thousands of years after the Pleistocene era ended. Recreation of hairy Pleistocene species is not the fantasy that many people might imagine. 

From mural depicting a herd walking near the Somme River in France
From mural by Charles R. Knight, 1916

As pointed out by Richard Dawkins in The Ancestor's Tale, "Hairiness is one of those characteristics that can increase or decrease in evolution again and again. Vestigial hairs, with their associated cellular support structures, lurk in even the barest-seeming skin, ready to evolve into a full coat of thick hair at short notice... Look at the woolly mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses that rapidly evolved in response to the recent ice ages in Eurasia."

The return of the Pleistocene megafauna presages the renewal of the tundra steppe, the grasslands associated with and maintained by these great creatures. Without such renewal, the carbon now sequestered in the soils of the mammoth ecosystem could end up as greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by rising temperatures, surpassing the total carbon content of all the planet's rain forests. Restored Pleistocene grasslands could stabilize the soil and prevent permafrost from melting.

The feeding habits of the megafauna could also prevent the growth of shrubs in the tundra and the movement of the boreal forest further north. Widespread shrub and tree expansion, by absorbing more of the sun's heat, could further magnify atmospheric heating over Arctic lands.

The Pleistocene Megafauna Chart below presents some of these Pleistocene species that may have inhabited the area of the proposed Yakutia Wilderness. Those species with a darker gray background are extinct.

Click chart below and expand to make readable.

Trans-Pecos

Desert Bighorn Sheep

If there is one word that would describe Texas wild lands today, it would be exotic. Texans has an affinity for exotic animals, especially deer and antelope, that are not native to the state. From 1963 to 1994, the exotic population in Texas grew from about 14,000 animals of 13 species to more than 195,000 animals and 71 species. 

The chart below lists six exotic animals now roaming free in the state in such numbers that they must be considered permanent additions to the mammal fauna according to The Mammals of Texas by David J. Schmidly. According to the chart, Texas' record for preserving exotic species seems to lean toward those least in need of help. None of the species fall within the two categories most vulnerable to extinction: (1) critically endangered and (2) endangered. Only one is included within the third most concerned category: vulnerable.

Click chart below and expand to make readable.

There are cases where ranchers have benefited endangered animals from elsewhere. The price, however, has been hunting, which the ranchers say is necessary to pay for the upkeep of the rest of the animals. This has been controversial. 

Envisioned Wilderness

 

Addax Antelope

This wilderness, envisioned as located in the Trans-Pecos region of West Texas and a portion of New Mexico, would be populated with antelope and other animals that can thrive in this hot and dry climate.

The satellite view Above shows the proposed wilderness area with orienting geographic features and cities. Prospective wildlife corridors are also indicated. The wilderness would be connected to other natural areas such as Mexico's Sierra Madre, the Canyonlands, High Plains, and the Edwards Plateau via these wildlife corridors.

Mountain Nyala Antelope

Emphasis would be on species that are truely endangered and will not out-compete native species. Predators that can cull out weaker creatures and keep numbers within the capacity of the natural environment would also be included.

Animals proposed for inclusion in this wilderness are indicated in the chart below. Exotic species (not either native, previous occupants of area, or naturalized) are in italics and a darker gray background, with their endangered status indicated. All the exotic animals are in one of the four most endangered categories (CR, EN, VU & LR) or are extinct in the wild (EW) according to the IUCN.

Click chart below and expand to make readable.

Pantanal Wilderness

The Pantanal is one of the largest and most spectacular freshwater ecosystems in the world, with an exceptionally high biodiversity. It is located south of the Amazon basin, at the crossroads of Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. It covers an estimated area of 175,000 square kilometers, about half the size of California. Numerous distinct ecological systems exist within its confines. 

Tributaries of the Paraguay River flood and recede every year, rhythmically transforming the region from floodplains to grassy savannahs. In addition to critical habitats for a diverse and highly concentrated array of vegetation and wildlife, the Pantanal’s hydrological system supports and provides certain invaluable ecosystem services to local communities, such as water purification, nutrient storage, sediment trapping, flood control, storm protection, and climate stabilization.

Located in the center of South America, the Pantanal forms a link between the biomes of the Amazon, the Cerrito savannah and the Chacos of Bolivia and Paraguay. The region lies at an altitude of less than 150 meters and the landscape is virtually flat. During the rainy season up to 80% of the territory is inundated, forcing out most of the local population, who temporarily migrate to the surrounding towns and villages. Beyond rivers and various forests, the Pantanal is a complex system of marshlands, floodplains, lagoons and interconnected drainage channels.

Brazilian Tapir

There is a fear that the Pantanal wetland may disappear by 2050. According to Conservation International, deforestation in the Brazilian Pantanal has quadrupled in recent years. Already,17 percent of the original vegetation has been lost in the region.

The envisioned wilderness would encompass most of this marsh land as well as some adjoining uplands. The proposed Pantanal Wilderness is shown below in a satellite view of the earth. The location of the Bolivian Altiplano and the cities of Santa Cruz, Cuiaba and Campo Grande provide for orientation of the viewer. Wildlife corridors would connect it to the Amazon jungle to the north, the Cerrado of Brazil to the northeast, and the dryer Chacos to the south and west. The Andes Mountains and the Altiplano would overlook the wilderness region from the west.

Sitatunga Antelope

The Pantanal Megafauna Chart below lists prospective wildlife inhabitants, current and envisioned (such as the Sitatunga Antelope from Africa on the left), that would most probably thrive in the Pantanal wetland. Those with a darker gray background are proposed new inhabitants not native or naturalized to South America. Where endangered, the categories are indicated; (CR, EN, VU & LR) or extinct in the wild (EW) according to the IUCN.

Click chart below and expand to make readable.

California Wilderness

The California Wilderness is envisioned as encompassing the wildest and least populated California lands of a within the Mediterranean climatic zone. As illustrated below, it would stretch south from the San Francisco Bay Area to the mountains just north of Los Angeles. East to west it would extend from the Central Valley to the Pacific Coast at Big Sur.

One of the best places today to examine the ancient Pleistocene life of Southern California is the La Brea Tar Pits. This video demonstrates the Pleistocene environment in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Grizzly Bear - Its return to California is a goal of many

The rebirth of the future California Pleistocene landscape began in the late 1970s with the relocation of tule elk into the Diablo Range in the northern wilderness reaches. This successful move was followed by the reintroduction of pronghorn antelope and tule elk to the Carrizo Plain in the central lands east of the Big Sur.

Beside wildlife currently extant in these lands, the wilderness would include representatives or relatives of animals once inhabiting California. 

The California Megafauna Chart below lists potential wildlife inhabitants in the ultimate wilderness. 

African Elephant

One example would be the African Elephant to represent the place of the Columbian Mammoth in the reconstituted pleistocene landscape. 

Most symbolic of the animals is the grizzly bear, whose only current residence in California is on the state flag. Its closest American relatives are found in the Yellowstone region of the Rocky Mountains south of the Canadian border.

The California Wilderness would be linked by wildlife corridors to the Mohave Desert and the Sierra Nevada Wildernesses. The Mohave corridor would cross the Tehachapi Mountains that enclose the south end of the Central Valley. 

Pronghorn Antelope

The Sierra corridor would cross the Central Valley, connecting across former oil fields to the Kern River Valley as it emerges from the Sierras. This corridor would pass through the north end of the City of Bakersfield where oil facilities currently are occupied. 200 years in the future this area would be ripe for cleanup and rebirth as a corridor for wildlife migrating across the Central Valley grasslands between the Coast Range and the Sierra Mountains. 

The major Highway 5 north/south arterial would most likely tunnel underneath the Mohave/Tehachapi corridor and bridge the Central Valley/Sierra corridor.

A corridor in the north would connect the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta with the northernmost extension of the California Wilderness. Given the potential increase in sea level over the coming 200 years, the 'Delta' may embrace a greatly increased expanse of open water and marshland.

Click chart below and expand to make readable.

Megafauna Restored

Some animals by their nature create and maintain biological diversity, making ecosystems stable and productive. The Pleistocene era, with its variety of megafauna, is the epitome of such ecological diversity. Restoring large creatures to the natural landscape can bring forth in the modern world such recreated environments of great ecological diversity and complexity. 

Pleistocene Extinction & Resurrection 

The Pleistocene epoch ended about 10,000 years ago. It was marked by great temperature fluctuations. Ice ages, with extensive glacial periods, were followed by warmer inter-glacial periods. An immense variety of large mammals (megafauna) inhabited the earth during this period. Various reasons have been proposed for the Pleistocene megafauna extinction. Details of this extinction event are discussed here. 

Scientists within the last decades have advanced justification for a Pleistocene rebirth in North America. They advocate the reintroduction of large animals inNorth America as part of a resurrection ecology. A Harvard professor in 2013 introduced a rationale for actually resurrecting extinct megafauna through DNA manipulation. 

Two hundred years in the future, the illustration above could be a scene in a future wilderness in western North America. The death race between two of the fastest mammals on earth has not occurred for 10,000 years. The crucial aspect of the painting is renewing a broken relationship of predator and prey, the reestablishment of an ancient bond.  

European Initiative

Wisent, the European Bison

Europe, with so many close living relatives of its extinct megafauna, has been taking a leadership role in the actual reintroduction and protection of large animals. 

Surprisingly, one of Europe's smallest countries, the Netherlands has taken the biggest step in Western Europe to create a living wilderness with a megafauna dominated ecology. This Oostvaardersplassen lies below sea level and its current 15,000 acres includes 3000 roaming wild horses, red deer and long-horned wild cattle.

The European Bison is subject of a Europe-wide effort to bring back this species from virtual extinction. The Wildland Research Institute in the United Kingdom aims to recreate wildlands and return exterminated species to Britain. Large herbivores have been advocated as a means to reduce wildfire danger in Mediterranean Europe. In Russia there is an ongoing effort to create an actual Pleistocene Park in Yakutia.

Candidate Species

 

White Rhinos - Gerald and Buff Corsi © California Academy of Sciences

Megafauna (nonbirds weighing more than five kilograms) in the new 'pleistocene' wildernesses will include:

• Existing native species,
• Species extirpated in most of their original range (such as the Grizzly Bear in California),
• Analogue species (an animal that can stand in for an unavailable one) such as the North American Cheetah, in order to create an approximate restoration of an ecosystem or
• Regenerated megafauna from DNA (eg; Woolly Mammoth). Cloning extinct species could be a real possibility in the near future. 
  
  

Benefits

A number of benefits accrue to this Pleistocene rewilding, such as:

• Preserve Endangered Species - Preserve large rare species, barely surviving now in Africa, Europe and Asia, in an extended and protected habitat where they might thrive and continue to evolve, not in a static zoo or wild animal park environment.
• Recreate Vibrant Ecologies - with the loss of the greater part of Pleistocene megafauna, many habitats of the Americas, Asia and Europe have become relatively lifeless at the scale most visible to people.  The reappearance of megafauna will bring back a richness of animal and plant life that has disappeared in large parts of the world. Witness the positive impact on the Yellowstone region in North America associated with the return of the Grey Wolf.
• Maintain Varied Habitats - Large animals have been one of natures tools to assure varied habitats that are not (a) as susceptible to disease and parasites, (b) overrun by a certain few animal species or (c) smothered by exotic plants whose natural control is missing.
• Increase popular support - people can relate to the picture of free ranging large mammals, witness its success on a smaller scale in the national parks of Africa or even San Diego's Wild Animal Park.  Such support is crucial to the saving of threatened species.
  
  

Caution Advised

 

Brush Rabbit, H Graem © 2006

There are ugly stories of man bringing exotic creatures to new lands, resulting in the local ecology being obliterated by the invaders. Witness rats, cats or goats on ocean islands or the rabbit scourge in Australia. Note the wiping out of the native birds on Guam by the Brown Tree Snake. 

 

Most of these exotic invaders were relatively small in size, breed up to large numbers very quickly and natural predators (such as the fox for the rabbit in Australia) may create new unintended consequences on the native fauna. The adverse impacts on the native ecology, especially in situations like Australia where the native mammal ecology (based on marsupials) is ill equiped to compete with the invaders, can be devastating.

An obvious question is presented by the pleistocene wilderness approach. How does the current proposal, to introduce megafauna missing from the local ecology, avoid such dangers? 

One difference is that the current proposal is for the introduction of megafauna, not the smaller, more prolific rats, rabbits, cats, foxes, snakes and similar animals that have devastated unique ecological habitats. Additionally, as the new megafauna acclimates and becomes established with sufficient numbers in its new home, the proposal is to also introduce their predators to keep all species in balance with the ecology.

As proposed in Nature, "Well-designed, hypothesis-driven experiments will be needed to assess the impacts of potential introductions before releases take place. Large tracts of private land probably hold the best immediate potential for such studies, with the fossil record and research providing guideposts and safeguards. For example, 77,000 large mammals (most of them Asian and African ungulates, but also cheetahs, camels and kangaroos) roam free on Texas ranches, although their significance for conservation remains largely unevaluated."

H Graem © 2012

 

 

Wilderness

Amazon Basin near Napo River in Ecuador, H. Graem © 2007

At the beginning of the 21st Century, the state of wilderness on the various continents differed greatly. Nevertheless, one characteristic was common to all - humans were putting wild areas under siege. Time to act becomes smaller each day.

Although protected areas have increased on paper, the actual situation on the ground is very different - especially in poorer countries and regions. Many of these 'protected' areas are subject to illegal hunting, tree cutting, and human settlement. Inadequate resources are being provided for protecting what wilderness remains.

Wilderness possibilities about the year 2000 are summarized on the map above. The potential for preserving and reestablishing wilderness and megafauna (the larger animals) by continent is discussed below.

 

Africa

Africa is the home of the great predominance of megafauna that have survived into the present age. It also contains many of the most threatened of these same species. To limit these remaining species to the African continent increases the probability of their extinction.

For this reason, creation of protected wilderness areas in the Americas is proposed.The Americas are bereft of megafauna due to the great extinction of some 10,000 years ago. These backup refuges for these species lesson the chance that disaster on one continent will bring about extinction.

 

Asia

Except for Africa, Asia contains the greatest number of surviving megafauna species. The Asian Elephant herd in the image below resides in India.

With the great populations of the southern and eastern parts of this continent, the pressure on surviving species has been great. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, hunting has had an increasing impact on the large species surviving in the more sparsely populated north.

Although remaining natural landscapes are sparse, creation of protected wilderness lands in the warmer parts of Asia is crucial. As with Africa, relocation of

threatened species to the Americas will diminish the the probability that they will be wiped out through extinction in Asia.

Given the smaller human population, creation of wilderness areas in the north within the bounds of the former Soviet Union may be more feasible. Here we may even consider bringing back lost pleistocene species through cloning of frozen remains or modifying existing species through genetic manipulation to better survive in colder climes.

 

Europe

Europe is the most densely populated of all the continents. Like the Americas, most of its megafauna has become extinct. There have been attempts to recreate the Tarpan, the European wild horse, by breeding individuals who closely resemble the phenotype of the original animal. Two examples are the Konik horses of the Netherlands (portrayed in the image to the right) and the Heck horse of Germany. While genetically not the same animal as the original Tarpan, their outward appearance and manner is similar.

Unlike North America, there is little sparsely populated land remaining in Europe in which wilderness of adequate size could be created. The principal exception to this situation is eastern Europe where protected wilderness lands could be realistically envisioned. The lands downwind of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, where a new wilderness has been spontaneously created, is one such example.

 

North America

 

 North America contains some of the most scenic and varied temperate habitats in the world. It ranges from arctic tundra to subtropical forest. The continent includes the uncommon cool rainforest of the North Pacific coast, California's coastal Mediterranean lands, the desert canyons of the Colorado Plateau, the high plains and prairies, and the vast forests covering much of the land east of the Mississippi River. The bison, most associated with the high plains, is shown to the left.

Of all the continents, the wilderness envisioned for North America is the most extensive. This is not because it is more deserving, but because we are most familiar with its habitat types and existing studies provide a solid foundation for wilderness location.

Although much of the eastern forest has regenerated in the past 100 years and many scenic areas are preserved in National Parks, the habitat is continually threaten by the sprawling and haphazard growth generated by the most powerful economy on earth. Significantly, a few habitat types exist in

contiguous areas of sufficient size to protect the viability of the resident plant and animal species.

 

Oceana

 

Oceana is defined here as including the mini-continents of Antarctica and Australia as well as most of the ocean islands not usually associated with a particular continent. Antarctica, with no permanent human inhabitants, is primarily a wilderness today. The only issue is whether its wildlife should be augmented with certain endangered species from the Arctic, such as polar bears and certain whales.

Australia has a population of about 20 million on a continent about the size of the mainland United States of America. Creation of future wilderness is clearly feasible. The fauna of that wilderness should probably be limited to marsupials native to Australia and nearby islands. The largest, the Kangaroo, is pictured here. Without careful evaluation, importing of more competitive mammals from other continents could be fatal to this relatively ancient mammal group.

 

South America

 

Guanacos in Torre del Paign National Park in Chile

South America lost most of its megafauna about the same time and probably due to similar causes as did North America. The habitat also has a breadth similar to that continent, with an emphasis in different areas. The guanaco, a relative of the camel, and native to both the altiplano and pampas, is shown to the left.

This continent contains the largest tropical rain forest in the world. It also contains deserts, plains and tundra environments, although at a much smaller scale than North America.

The Amazon rain forest is currently under attack by timber cutters, ranchers and poor farmers. On a trip to the Amazon in Ecuador, I experienced the negative impact on abundance of larger wildlife from hunting pressures in a 'protected' area.

Survival of linked rain forest wilderness extending over a wide assortment of tropical habitats and incorporating endangered species from the tropical areas of Africa and Asia is a vision.