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Restoring Nature's Backbone

Henry Nicholls

Henry Nicholls is a freelance science journalist. His first book, Lonesome George: The Life and Loves of a Conservation Icon, is published by Macmillan. E-mail: henry. nicholls@absw.org.uk

Funding. The author received no specific funding for this article.

Published: June 13, 2006

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0040202

Copyright: © 2006 Henry Nicholls. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Citation: Nicholls H (2006) Restoring Nature's Backbone. PLoS Biol 4(6): e202

A herd of bison has just made an extraordinary migration. The distance these animals travelled was huge—nearly 5,000 miles—and their means of transport was highly unorthodox: they flew. The cargo plane took some thirty of these hulking mammals from Elk Island National Park of Canada across Alaskan airspace, over the Bering Strait, and into the Republic of Yakutia. Their ultimate destination: the Lenskiye Stolby Nature Park, a 78,500-hectare reserve in northeast Siberia more commonly known as “Pleistocene Park.”

This is the latest phase of an experiment to explore the impact of large herbivores that once roamed these lands on the biodiversity and integrity of the Siberian steppe ecosystem. One key consequence of putting such creatures back is that they disrupt the snow cover during the winter, exposing the ground to the cold and preserving the permafrost. Without these herbivores, the snow insulates the earth and the permafrost melts, says Sergei Zimov, director of the Northeast Science Station in Cherskii, and the brains behind Pleistocene Park. This could allow microbes to break down vast reserves of carbon contained in the earth, thereby contributing to global warming, he says [1]. The return of once-native flora and fauna—so-called “rewilding”—should prevent this and bring the soil much-needed fertilization. “Rewilding will increase the bioproductivity and biodiversity of the landscape,” he predicts.

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