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Abstract

French

Climate change is transforming restoration ecology, particularly regarding species translocations. Many species may be unable to keep pace with rapidly shifting climatic conditions, risking extinction. As a result, restoration ecology has had to move beyond its traditional, nostalgic focus on returning ecosystems to past states. In response to this new reality, future-oriented strategies have emerged – chief among them, assisted migration. This approach involves relocating species to areas where they are more likely to thrive under new environmental conditions, even if those areas lie outside their historical range. This article explores the conceptual and managerial shift in conservation thinking brought about by such practices. Using a genealogical approach, we trace the evolution of restoration ecology and examine the contradictions and dilemmas introduced by assisted migration. We also analyze rewilding as a complementary and increasingly influential restoration strategy. Our discursive analysis shows how these emerging practices reflect a broader transformation in environmental conservation – from efforts to restore the past to designing ecological futures. This shift challenges foundational ecological categories such as native, endemic, alien, and invasive species, along with the moral and scientific frameworks that have historically guided conservation: historical fidelity, territorial integrity, and species composition. Ultimately, we argue that the growing prominence of scientifically induced species mobilities – justified by climate change and aimed at creating novel ecosystems – signals a move beyond restoration as traditionally understood. Instead, what is emerging is a new paradigm of anticipatory ecology, grounded not in recovery, but in proactive, future-oriented landscape design.

Keywords

anticipatory ecology assisted migration climate change rewilding species translocations

Introduction

To some extent rapid climate change changes everything, including how we should view introductions versus reintroductions. (Seddon, 2010: 796)

Climate change is altering the way environmental conservation is thought and enacted. The overarching shift in weather patterns seems no longer to belong to an indeterminate future, but rather to a pressing present. Climate change is different from previous weather modifications experienced by humans. The scale, pace, and kind of climatic changes implicated make it a radically new, challenging phenomenon for environmental conservation, particularly for those programs aiming at restoring degraded environments. The inevitable understanding of the fact that as a planet we are in a period of environmental emergency is affecting everything and providing a rationale for the development of new, sometimes unsettling ideas in the field of restoration ecology. It was not a coincidence that key global climate change negotiations, including landmark agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, took place in the same decade as restoration ecology was exploring new pathways and gaining traction in the broader field of conservation biology (Pickett and Parker, 1994).

Others have developed so-called genealogies of conservation. Most of them have focused on the intellectual and practical development of governance systems with special emphasis on the political frameworks generated by every model, from fortress, to participatory, to neoliberal, to convivial conservation (Adams and Hutton, 2007; Büscher and Fletcher, 2020; Vaccaro et al., 2013). In these genealogies, focused on governmentality (Agrawal, 2005), protected areas are seen as territorializing public policies, and the focus is to discern the power balances (or inequalities) generated by their creation (Brockington et al., 2008). This article, in contrast, is concerned with the understanding of actual practices of ecological restoration, what are their goals, and what are the conceptual consequences of their emergence and implementation.

Climate change is shaping environmental conditions on the ground at an unprecedented scale and pace. Once ‘the biophysical envelope changes geographically’ (Harris et al., 2006: 171), some scientists have assumed that some species will not be able to adapt, to move fast enough, and thus risk to become extinct (Bradley et al., 2024; Corlett and Westcott, 2013). Conservation has always been about saving biodiversity from anthropogenic degradation, ‘a conservative, common-sense measure to protect a self-evident nature’ (Jacoby, 2019: 291), but under the climate change threat it has become about considering proactive anticipatory interventions (Anderson, 2010). As a result, we are witnessing the flourishment of conservation initiatives that consist of translocating species from their native range, where conditions are starting to become suboptimal, into new areas that should offer favorable conditions for them to thrive. Climate emergency assisted migration is born.

Assisted migration emerges at the beginning of the 21st century (Hällfors et al., 2014). Although the term conveyed from the very beginning the sense of translocating organisms under the effects of climate change, the first initiatives were spearheaded by the timber industry (Williams and Dumroese, 2013). Canada, and more specifically the Western province of British Columbia, was the first government that implemented programs in the 2000s consisting in moving trees up to northern regions, namely higher latitudes (poleward) and higher elevations (upward), away from the progressively warmer southern ranges of their native habitats (Buranyi, 2016; Forests, n.d.; O’Neill et al., 2008; Twardek et al., 2023). These translocation plans were intended to maintain the commercial viability of the timber industry considering that upcoming climate change scenarios were likely to hinder the growing and thriving of trees in their historic niches (Klenk and Larson, 2015). More recently, as the term has become popular in the academic literature alongside pioneering implementation programs in other regions through public funds (Assisted Migration of Forests as a climate change economic mitigation strategy (AMECO), 2016; Blanco-Cano et al., 2024; Casazza et al., 2021; Chakraborty et al., 2024; Fenu et al., 2023; Gardner and Bullock, 2025), scholarly controversies notwithstanding (Hewitt et al., 2011; Nackley et al., 2017; Ricciardi and Simberloff, 2009; Wallingford et al., 2020), assisted migration has been redefined as a subset of assisted colonization (Corlett, 2016). Today, the term conveys the sense of

safeguarding biological diversity through the translocation of representatives of a species or population harmed by climate change to an area outside their indigenous range of that unit where it would be predicted to move as climate changes, were it not for anthropogenic dispersal barriers or lack of time. (Hällfors et al., 2014: 10)

Once intended to support timber commercial purposes, assisted migration has become part of the environmental conservation toolkit to mitigate massive loss of biodiversity in the face of upcoming new climatic scenarios (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2008).

Climate change has spurred new ways of understanding the core principles conservation biology and restoration ecology must be built upon. As Fry (2023) noted, since the 1990s-decade nature conservation began to shift away from a focus on preservation, territorial integrity, and ecological composition, toward more proactive, creative approaches (Adams, 2003; Castree and Braun, 1998). The focus shifted from protecting or recovering previous assemblages of species (compositionalist approach), to restoring the ecological functions and dynamics of an ecosystem with species that could have been, or not, part of that particular ecosystem in the past (functionalist approach) (Ladle and Whittaker, 2011). Assisted migration, thus, is just the last iteration of scientifically induced biomobilities devised by the conservation world. It is different from previous schemes inasmuch as it is explicitly justified by the threat caused directly or indirectly by anthropogenic climate change (Hällfors et al., 2014), but it stems from a genealogy of conservation initiatives framed by an anticipatory new paradigm in restoration ecology (Anderson, 2010; Conroy, 2020).

Nostalgic, backward-looking approaches, whose goal was to restore previous degraded or lost ecosystems, are nowadays cohabiting with more pragmatic, forward-looking approaches, like rewilding, in which the historical knowledge of the past is seen as a guide rather than a template (Higgs et al., 2014), and a functional image of the future is what is supposed to drive restoration initiatives (Choi, 2004, 2007). As some ecology scholars are starting to say, restoration ecology must focus on ‘conserv[ing] the game, not the players, maintaining ecological and evolutionary processes rather than particular species’, and this approach ‘requires us to stop trying to maintain the world as it was and instead try to shape the world that will be’ (Gardner and Bullock, 2025). The translocation of species to secure tomorrow’s ecosystem resilience under contemporary rapid environmental transformations is, therefore, not a unique characteristic of assisted migration.

Rewilding is ‘a future-oriented restoration proposal that seeks to [. . .] secure the ecosystem resilience of tomorrow’ (Sandom et al., 2013: 445). Pleistocene rewilding, one of the most radical examples of rewilding, uses a remote historical period (11,000 years ago) as a functional reference for contemporary restoration projects. Many of the species that inhabited Pleistocene landscapes are, of course, currently extinct. They are supposed to be replaced, in order to achieve Pleistocene levels of ecosystem functionality, by contemporary proxies (Donlan et al., 2006). Rewilding aligns with assisted migration, as both can include the promotion of the translocation of species beyond their current biogeographic ranges under a forward-looking new paradigm shaped by climate emergency scenarios. Some scholars have pointed out that both assisted migration and rewilding are examples of non-traditional conservation initiatives underpinned by the rationales of active intervention and experimentation (Corlett, 2015). Others have even considered them ‘kindred spirits’ for their capacity to generate new ecological scenarios, particularly when rewilding entails taxon substitution (Hansen, 2010), translocating species from elsewhere with similar functions and characteristics to those that used to dwell in those environments in a pre-human ecological baseline, namely the Pleistocene era around 11,000 years ago. Rewilding emerged prior to the inception of assisted migration as part of the functionalist turn in restoration ecology by the end of the 20th century (Soulé and Noss, 1998). Likewise, the rationale underpinning this innovative conservation scheme was forward-looking, presented as a pioneering attempt, not exempt of some risks, in the face of mass species extinction. Rewilding thus partially appeared as a response to the current climate crisis, but it did so, carrying over the burden of the past, both semantically and epistemologically. While the use of the prefix ‘re-’ certainly conveys the sense of return or repetition of something that existed in the past (Corlett, 2016), rewilding is also built upon the (pre-)historical evidence of the previous presence of functional analogues where the species will be translocated. Thus, while rewilding resembles assisted migration in the sense of being conceived as a proposal to ‘look into the future and venture into the unknown’ (Vasile, 2018: 218), the two aforementioned semantic and epistemic features offer an interesting contrast with assisted migration, a full-fledged forward-looking conservation scheme, explicitly linked to climate change.

This article seeks to contribute to the understanding of the ‘futuristic’ intellectual and managerial shift in conservation, by tracing a genealogical approach to the field of restoration ecology. Our discursive examination of restoration ecology, in general, and rewilding and assisted migration in particular, underlines the extent to which environmental conservation is and has always been about landscape design (Beltran and Vaccaro, 2023; Sides, 2024) and reconfigurations of the prevailing socioecological relationships taking into account specific and culturally-dependent moral ecologies (Griffin et al., 2019). Through this lens, the sociocultural values and emotions attached to some species may be as important as the ecological assessment of their translocation into new ranges (Fry, 2023). The environment the public policies or private entrepreneurs will try to preserve or restore might be mimicking the alleged situation of the area on the 1980s, the 19th century, the fifteen hundreds, or the Pleistocene. Or maybe it will try to ‘recreate’ a radically novel environment, something with uncertain outcomes given upcoming climatic scenarios. After all, ‘concepts and assumptions as well as politics and power, determine what gets restored’ (Hall, 2010: 7).

How has climate change reshaped restoration ecology? Looking back, looking forward

We cannot go back to our nostalgic past! (Choi, 2007: 351)

Climate change is causing an increase in mean temperatures, shifts in patterns of precipitation, increasing incidence of extreme climatic events, and raising sea levels (Harris et al., 2006). Floods, droughts, wildfires, and other catastrophic meteorological events are becoming increasingly frequent as they spread worldwide, causing varying levels of damage at different locales. Three features behind these shifting weather patterns are key to understand how climate change differs from previous meteorological variations, and more importantly for the scope and aim of this article, how these features help us better understand the shifting rationales behind species translocation schemes in restoration ecology, from nostalgic backward-looking principles to creative forward-looking initiatives (Alagona et al., 2012; Corlett, 2016; Sandom et al., 2013). The spatial and temporal scales, the pace, and the role of humankind in altering the overarching weather conditions on our planet have opened a ‘window for change’ for conservation initiatives (Jepson, 2015: 118).

Although the tangible impacts and social perceptions of climate change are usually locally grounded, we are witnessing its effects at a global scale. Likewise, climate change forces us to expand our temporal framework, stretching back to a remote pre-changed past time, but foremost pressing us to look ahead, extending our temporal scope far beyond the present to hint at an indeterminate, uncertain future. Time seems no longer to flow from the present to the future, but rather from the future to the present, and the socioecological transformations coming toward us, albeit their inherent unpredictability, call for urgent, anticipatory actions under the new presence of the future (Anderson, 2010; Braun, 2015). Climate emergency thus shifts the spatial and temporal scale through which to apprehend the weather transformations that we are capable (or incapable) to grasp through our senses in our everyday lives. The second crucial feature that makes climate change different from other weather events is its pace. We are late. The machinery of fossil fuels extraction and consumption has been rolling for a long time, and prediction models envision that we will not be able to stop it before a massive loss of biodiversity occurs (Harris et al., 2006). The magnitude and speed of climate change are so high that some scientists have assumed that conservative measures might not suffice to revert the sixth mass extinction (Cowie et al., 2022). Consequently, ecology scholars recognize that ‘even optimistic estimates of natural movement may be insufficient for species to keep pace with climate change’ (McLachan et al., 2007: 297). The third and last characteristic is, perhaps, what makes climate change a justification for creative, unsettling alternatives, spurring heated debates around nature conservation: the prominent role of humankind in triggering, sustaining, and heightening these undesired changes. Human beings are in the spotlight as never before as the key agents of these impacts while the effects caused by capitalist socioeconomic activities seem to surpass our capacity to counterbalance or, at least, mitigate them. In this sense, climate change becomes the logical unwanted consequence of the consolidation of the Anthropocene, the ‘period in which human activities have come to have a global impact’ (Robbins and Moore, 2013: 5). As a result, climate change can be understood as the paradigmatic global consequence of a wide range of human activities related to the extraction and consumption of natural resources, thus interlocked with the expansion of capitalism worldwide (Büscher and Fletcher, 2020; Moore, 2015).

The combination of these three features of climate change, namely the spatial and temporal scales, the pace, and the prominent role of humankind, has entailed profound consequences for environmental conservation, particularly in the field of restoration ecology. The notions of flux (Zimmerer, 2000), landscape fluidity (Manning et al., 2009), uncertainty (Millar et al., 2007), novelty (Hobbs et al., 2006, 2013), and ecological dynamics took over the previous focus on the restoration of a prior static composition of species (Jepson, 2015).

At the end of the last century, species translocation began to be common in conservation biology across the globe. Mostly large carnivores, but also other keystone large herbivores, were captured in ecosystems where they were abundant and released in others where they were extinct or about to be so (Pons-Raga et al., 2021). The preservationist phase of conservation biology, which started with zoos and captivity reproduction programs (Braverman, 2011; Philo and Wilbert, 2000) and continued along with the creation and expansion of territorially bounded natural protected areas (West et al., 2006), gave way to a more creative phase in which the recovery of vanished ecosystems via the translocation of species was slowly subsumed by the need to protect the viability of entire ecosystems through the creation of novel, sometimes uncertain, future ecological scenarios having in mind that global rapid environmental transformations were on the way. A new era of restoration ecology, sometimes identified as ‘restoration ecology 2.0’ (Higgs et al., 2014), underpinned by progressive and forward rather than conservative and backward-looking principles, was born (Alagona et al., 2012; Choi, 2004; Pickett and Parker, 1994).

The traditional definition of restoration ecology emphasized the attempt to return an ecosystem to its historical trajectory or to restore the previous state of its ecological communities prior to an anthropogenic disturbance. Succession theory (Clemens, 1916; Odum, 1969), broadly understood as the natural dynamics or trajectory of ecological communities after some disturbance, was thus taken as the point of departure for restoration practices. The goal of classical restoration programs was ‘to halt degradation and to redirect a disturbed ecosystem in a trajectory resembling that presumed to have prevailed before the onset of disturbance’ (Choi, 2004: 77), to intervene in the interactions between what is seen as the natural order of things and the chaos brought about by human activities (Worster, 1990). The field of restoration ecology was thus first devoted to ‘the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that had been degraded, damaged, or destroyed’ (Harris et al., 2006: 172), relying on fixed reference points or temporal baselines and on confirmed past compositions of species. What happens, though, when upcoming climatic scenarios make any previous ecological baseline unsuitable to predict the conditions for a species to thrive or for the desirable dynamics of an ecosystem to reoccur? What happens when restoration must hinge upon uncertainty and variability under the advent of climate emergency?

As rapid climatic transformations made the return to previous ecosystems questionable, restoration ecology shifted toward a futuristic (Choi, 2004, 2007) and functional approach (Higgs et al., 2014). Under this new paradigm, the species to be moved to restore a desirable habitat do not have to be necessarily connected to the past of this particular environment, but to its future resilience. In other words, ecological dynamics, functionality, should prevail over recovering a specific, ‘original’, species assemblage or composition. In the era of climate emergency, restoration ecology has been impelled to address ‘the tension between purist idealism’ of the past and ‘pragmatic realism’ for the future (Warren, 2023: 302). Out of this crux, there seems to be a general call to establish ‘possible ways forward in framing meaningful and realistic restoration objectives for the future’ (Harris et al., 2006: 170).

Restoration ecology 2.0, a set of initiatives to recover environments based on a creative and functional approach instead of restitution model, will have to grapple with issues associated with historical fidelity (time), ecological integrity (space), and communities’ composition (species biodiversity). Assisted migration and the latest forms of rewilding, such as Pleistocene taxon substitution, explicitly or implicitly, are already dealing with these three aspects under the legitimation cloak of climate change. We draw closer attention to them in the next section.

Historical fidelity, ecological integrity, and species composition at stake: Bison rewilding in Spain

Since 2010, individuals of European bison (Bison bonasus) have been translocated from Poland into Spain in several releases. In 2024, their numbers in the Iberian Peninsula amounted to more than 170 individuals, all of them dwelling in 10 large fenced private estates. The program has been supported by the European Bison Conservation Center (EBCC), which gathers breeders from a wide range of countries, mostly from Eastern Europe but also Spain. The translocation of these animals into Spain, spanning from northern Castilla-León to southern Andalusian estates, has sparked heated debates among the scientific community (Nores et al., 2024). After all, strictly speaking, this species has never been present in the Iberian Peninsula. The defenders of the project argue, however, that the country has numerous and world-famous Paleolithic cave paintings that depict bison. It is another bison species, steppe bison (Bison priscus), disappeared from the area around 13,000 years ago, and extinct from our planet 6000 years ago, but the point, they say, remains.

In 2024, the Spanish government refused to consider the proposal to include the European bison in the Spanish Wild Species in Special Protection Regime list, and the initiative was opposed as well by most of the Spanish scientific community (Nores et al., 2024). Our goal is not to address the nuances underpinning this debate, even less to make a moral judgment about the request itself or the opposition of some scientific groups to previous and future translocations of bison into Spain. Instead, our interest focuses on how the arguments in favor and opposing rewilding initiatives, such as the translocation of European bison into Spain, are mobilized around the idea of biological and historical belonging of the species: historical fidelity, a foundational pillar of classic restoration ecology. Beyond all the ecological and socioeconomic reasons mentioned to oppose the reintroduction of European bison in the Iberian Peninsula, namely the conditions the species will have to adapt to regarding the arid future climatic scenarios in Spain, or those supporting the proposal, namely their potential role to prevent wildfires and the eventual economic revenues the species might bring into depauperized peripheral rural areas as an ecotourism asset, the scientific argument that takes prominence in the discussion, from both standpoints, is whether Bison bonasus must be considered a native species of the Iberian Peninsula or not. After all, the scientific verdict of this debate has significant consequences on the ground: the possibility of releasing the species into the wild in Spain under the framework of national conservation laws.

Whereas those opposing the translocation initiatives argue that ‘the species was never present in the [Iberian] Peninsula’ (Planelles and Sánchez, 2021), those supporting the proposal claim that archeological evidence of the bison’s presence in southern France, near the border, proves their historical presence in Spain (see Nores et al., 2024). Besides this counterfactual scientific evidence, they also articulate a crucial point: the Paleolithic paintings carved in Altamira cave, one of the most famous archeological sites in the Iberian Peninsula, with the presence of herds of bison on the inner rocks, ‘make Spain’, as one of the translocation program’s promoters asserted, ‘an emblematic country for the bison’ (Cerrillo, 2024).

The bison case in Spain shows an instance in which, despite rewilding’s prevailing focus on restoring ecosystem functions, promoters and opposers of the translocation end up centering the debate on species belonging, on origin (Nores et al., 2024). In other words, rewilding, even in its newest versions is still often species and origin-centered, closer to a nostalgic, compositional restoration paradigm, embedded in the concepts of historical fidelity, ecological integrity, and species composition.

This point presses us to underline that rewilding faces two main paradoxes. Before addressing them, though, we need to make a genealogical detour. Rewilding was first defined in North America in the 1990s as the ‘scientific argument for restoring big wilderness based on the regulatory roles of large predators’ (Soulé and Noss, 1998: 22), but it rapidly expanded to include other keystone species such as sizable herbivores (e.g. bison) to restoring self-regulating ecosystems (Vasile, 2018, 2024). Among the plethora of subtypes and definitions surrounding rewilding, a general binary classification can be established between interventionist and non-interventionist initiatives. A non-interventionist approach advocates, especially in areas where there has been human depopulation, to let natural processes develop by themselves. In contrast, interventionism implies management, reintroduction of species to facilitate ecological restoration. Under its more interventionist version, rewilding takes a controversial step further when it reintroduces locally extinct taxa to achieve the overarching goal of restoring top-down trophic interactions. When local taxa are no longer available, rewilding might include the translocation of new species, involving taxon substitutes, often taking the pre-human Pleistocene era as the temporal baseline, in order to restore degraded or lost ecological dynamics (Donlan et al., 2006).

Pleistocene rewilding is future-oriented but it holds a semantic and factual clear reference to the past. Although the prefix ‘re-’ seems to convey a sense of returning to the past, thus reinforcing the idea that rewilding is about nostalgia (Corlett, 2016), it is meant to convey novelty and uncertainty, looking and venturing into an unknown future (Vasile, 2018). And yet, its experimental, uncertain, risky, and future-oriented scope is counterbalanced by the legal underpinnings of their actual programs. Species holding locally endangered status are more likely to be able to have access to legal protection and funding for reintroduction programs than their ‘alien’ counterparts. Under current legal principles, proving that a species, or a taxon substitute, can be connected to a previous, even loose, temporal baseline in a given territory, is paramount to make any rewilding proposal scientifically sound and legally plausible. Rewilding may be future-oriented, but it cannot completely release itself from its backward-looking temporal bearings. The second paradox grapples with the functionalist-compositionalist dilemma. Whereas interventionist rewilding allegedly aligns itself with the restoration of ecological functions and dynamics away from restoring a specific composition of species, it still needs to be implemented via the release of the quintessential biological unit of ecology, that is, species. Proactive rewilding has proven extreme heterogeneity, though. In some cases, conservation programs, with its quest for ecosystem recovery, have used unlikely reintroduction candidates such as horses and cows to restore an environment (Jepson, 2025). In others, the efforts have focused on keystone species, namely megafauna, and not only for their ecological roles under an accurate trophic chain modeling analysis, but also for their charismatic potential (Barua, 2011; Donlan et al., 2006). In short, taxon substitution choices have proven to be very context-dependent and variegated in nature.

The case of rewilding via bison ‘reintroduction’ in Spain shows to what extent new restoration practices on the ground are still much attached to three fundamental and foundational pillars of classic restoration ecology – historical fidelity, ecological integrity, and species composition – to determine the geographies of belonging of a species in a given ecosystem. Restoration practices need a temporal baseline or a reference ecosystem to mirror; they are following the constraints of territorial boundaries marked by biogeographic ranges where endangered native species may dwell and specific legal ordinances apply, and they mainly work with specific biological units, namely species, whose relevance tends to rely as much on their intrinsic values (compositional paradigm) as on the ecological dynamics they are capable to sustain (functionalist paradigm). Under rapid climatic transformations, restoration ecology has sought to shift away from the notions of ecological integrity and historical fidelity, and has moved toward a new conceptualization of history as a guideline rather than a template, considering multiple and open-ended trajectories, and drawing on a processual rather than a compositional emphasis (Higgs et al., 2014), as an attempt to move away from, or at least reconsider biological nativism. However, as proven by the contemporary debates around the translocation of bison in Spain, rewilding and restoration ecology schemes are constantly grappling with temporal, spatial, and compositional contradictions to assess what belongs, or should belong to where (Cordell et al., 2021). In short, despite the overt claims to move toward a functionalist paradigm, away from which specific species compose a given ecosystem, restoration ecology has not been able to get rid of the contradictions associated with the multiple ways species are defined: endemic, native, migrant, alien, invasive, keystone, charismatic, flagship, umbrella, and so on (Barua, 2011; Stanescu and Cummings, 2017; Warren, 2023; Woods and Moriarty, 2001). Under the pressing threat of anthropogenic climate change, assisted migration illustrates, as no other species translocation scheme, the inherent contradictions and challenges restoration ecology must deal with (Vaccaro and Beltran, 2009).

The contradictions of assisted migration: Moving species across time and space under new biological nativism

[I]n a rapidly changing world, many species may no longer be well adapted to emerging conditions in their historic ranges, further challenging the equating of ‘native’ with ‘best’. (Warren, 2023: 303)

The increased biomobility, also named human-mediated introductions (Seebens et al., 2017), occurring nowadays, randomly, through the unplanned and undesired arrival of species, or, deliberately, supported by scientific rationales encompassed by the large umbrella of restoration ecology, has called into question ‘standard conceptions of historical fidelity and native species’ (Calarco, 2017: 5). Focusing on biological nativism, a key concept of restoration ecology that allows for ‘uncritically assigning the moral status of species based on a one dimensional logic of origins’ (Cordell et al., 2021: 2), we seek to reveal the contradictions assisted migration needs to grapple with, considering both the long-standing struggles of the conservation world against invasive alien species (IAS) and the new functionalist principles of restoration ecology.

The whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) was declared an endangered species by the Canadian federal government in 2012, and in 2022 the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared it vulnerable. Plagues and droughts enabled by climate change had started to generate massive mortalities of several species of pines, larches, cedars all over the lower parts of their ecological range (Palik et al., 2022). Experimental planting up to 600 kilometers north of its original range had started early in the 21st century. The goal was to identify the biophysical characteristics (altitude, latitude, snow cover, etc.) that would facilitate its growth (McLane and Aitken, 2012). Currently, hundreds of thousands of seedlings are being planted outside the original range of several tree species in the United States and Canada, and elsewhere (Xu and Prescott, 2024). Forests, often with the dozens of species that travel with them, are emerging where there were none.

Assisted migration is the latest conservation scheme of species translocations. To be the last one is not a mere coincidence. Assisted migration is the first paradigm in the realm of restoration ecology that not only stems from, but also gives an explicit response to climate change. The rationale was clearly stated in the 2000s: ‘If circumventing climate-driven extinction is a conservation priority, then assisted migration must be considered a management option’ (McLachan et al., 2007: 297). The principles underpinning this statement are easy to grasp. If we want to preserve some endangered species in the face of upcoming climatic scenarios, we need to move them. What is implied behind and ahead of this rationale may not be, though, so easy to fit into the genealogy of restoration ecology.

If we take a closer look at the premises underpinning assisted migration, key features stand out as differential from other translocation schemes. Besides its inception as an explicit response to anthropogenic climate change, assisted migration is founded on the ‘performative operation of establishing the presence of what has not happened and may never happen’ (Anderson, 2010: 783), on the prediction and hence the anticipation of future ecological scenarios rather than the restoration or recreation of previous ecosystems. Its goal is to enhance the dispersal of certain species, considering the geographical constraints they might encounter in the near future if this assistance is not provided (Hällfors et al., 2014). Some of its characteristics seem to merely stretch the elements already heralded by other schemes under the new restoration ecology paradigm (i.e. both, assisted migration and some rewilding initiatives, promote the translocation of species taking into account futuristic scenarios). Other aspects, like getting rid of the species belonging fetichism, seem to take a revolutionary shift that deserves a more detailed attention as they call into question foundational paradigms of both classical and new versions of restoration ecology. Inevitably, a complex dialogue with invasion biology principles emerges. In many quarters, assisted migration is considered a form of planned invasion (Buranyi, 2016; Mueller and Hellmann, 2008; Ricciardi and Simberloff, 2009).

Invasion biology has its roots in the book The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (Elton, 1958). However, very quickly the term shifted from its descriptive origins toward a moral paradigm under which being alien or exotic was not only deemed to be not originally from a specific biogeographic range, but also an undesired presence, indicating ecosystem degradation, bad biodiversity, or unwanted nature caused by human-induced introductions (Warren, 2023; Woods and Moriarty, 2001). Non-native alien species, particularly when their presence cause detrimental effects on native species are classified as invasive, one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss in the face of current mass extinction (Bellard et al., 2017; Genovesi and Shine, 2004; IPBES, 2023). Historically, the essentialization of the idea of being native to one place has been the foundation of conservation and restoration plans. The terms alien or exotic, understood as ‘being out of place’, conversely, became synonymous of a negative disturbance that had to be addressed (Vaccaro and Beltran, 2009). The literature and the mainstream language are plagued with expressions with negative connotations associated with species that are outside of their ‘natural’ range: concepts such as alien or invasive species are part of these tropes. Conservation, in a sense, has been an intellectual construct based on a clear assessment of certain geographies of belonging (Mee and Wright, 2009).

The increasing global mobility of people has entailed the spread of many species worldwide (Joo et al., 2022). A large proportion of the species composing today’s ecosystems can be simply considered alien, brought by humans. Tomatoes and potatoes, for instance, are key elements of the Spanish or Italian diets, despite being introduced species in the Mediterranean basin. A few of them, though, are causing serious threats to native species, and hence are defined as invasive (IPBES, 2023). Yet, being alien or invasive is not a static, fixed category in time. This point is even more acute when considering the increasing fluidity in current ecosystems under the rapid environmental modifications caused by climate change. Ironically, it applies to the ‘native’ category as well (Cordell et al., 2021). Belonging, thus, is at the intersection of time and space. It is also fraught with meanings and feelings: a whole sociocultural dimension, traversed by affective situated practices and knowledge (Fry, 2023). Depending on these cultural and affective variables, native species may be welcomed by some (ecology scholars and conservationists) while rejected by others (peasants and farmers), a debate between different moral ecologies (Jacoby, 2019).

The questioning of the native/non-native binary as the moral paradigm to assess the acceptability of restoration ecology practices has partially opened the door to assisted migration. If, in a rapid changing world, ‘no ecosystem is exempt from vulnerability to invasion’ (Cordell et al., 2021: 4), and we are obliged to embrace fluidity, uncertainty, novelty, and dynamism as part of current and future ecosystems under climate emergency, there is room for moving species beyond their native ranges under scientific rationales to prevent their extinction. Assisted migration thus springs from the opportunity created by climate emergency, but then, how is it fitting with the long-standing and persistent struggles against deliberate or random dispersal of IAS? And second, if ‘future-oriented restoration should focus on ecosystem functions rather than recomposition of species or the cosmetics of landscape surface’ (Choi, 2007: 352), if what matters the most is the game, not the players (Gardner and Bullock, 2025), how does assisted migration, clearly founded upon single species-oriented principles, fits with the new restoration ecology paradigm and sites in the compositionalist-functionalist spectrum?

By aiding the dispersal of endangered species beyond their native ranges under certain cascade of circumstances within a scientific decision framework (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2008), assisted migration needs to deal with two contradictions in relation to the concept of biological nativism. On the one hand, we encounter the complex articulation of assisted migration with invasion biology as it claims the duty to prevent the extinction of some species by moving them beyond their niche, while prohibiting the introduction of others, namely IAS. In other words, it ignores the species belonging imperative of classic restoration ecology. The apprehensions raised by this approach, in a way, align with some of the concerns already raised by rewilding initiatives that include taxon substitutions, which translate into the risk of engendering new invasive species (Hansen, 2010). On the other hand, it contravenes the principles of classic and new restoration ecology by reconfiguring two of their pillars: historical fidelity and ecological integrity. Assisted migration does not seem to adhere to the functional paradigm stricto sensu as its main concern is the environmental conditions that will allow a species to thrive; it does not follow the compositionalist paradigm based on biological nativism either, as the species that will be moved will not be native to the place where they will be sent. In Corlett and Westcott’s (2013: 486) words, assisted migration needs to address the balance between understanding ‘local communities as coevolved assemblages’ or ‘local communities as the result of ecological fitting of species independent from their evolutionary history’. Both conceptualizations revolve around the new ways in which biological nativism takes shape under the current climate emergency, away from its classical origin-centered narrative and toward a new paradigm in which the paramount concern is whether a species fits into an environment or ecosystem in order to prevent its extinction. In other words, ‘given that all species need to shift their ranges to keep up with climate change’ and considering that some ‘native species’, termed neonative, ‘have [already] shifted their ranges outside of their historical native range [. . .] in response to climate change’ (Bradley et al., 2024: 24–25), assisted migration would merely reinforce this natural phenomenon.

In doing so, assisted migration unsettles the fundamentals of biological nativism, namely the geographies of species belonging based on ecosystem’s ecological integrity and historical fidelity. Space and time play a paradoxical role here. While the policies to mitigate the effects of IAS take the variable of space based on a past-present timeline (having been here before, legitimizes presence here now), assisted migration entails a radical shift in spatio-temporal terms as it is not concerned about the historical absence of species in certain areas for the sake of their future existence. In other words, assisted migration is meant and performed upon anticipatory geographies (Anderson, 2010), upon a future, apocalyptic ecological baseline, marked by new climatic scenarios of anthropogenic origin (Hamilton, 2018; Northcott, 2015).

As such, assisted migration seems to go one step further from not only classic biological nativism, imbued with the compositionalism principles and focused on the morally charged origin-centered native/alien binary classification, but also the functionalism paradigm proposed by restoration ecology 2.0. The former understands species as belonging to a conglomerate that includes space and time, that is, the historical dimensions of a species in a given territory or ecosystem. The latter proposed a shift from a species-centered rationale (compositionalism), in which native species, in theory, are the only concerns and tools of restoration schemes, toward the restoration of ecological functions and dynamics. What we see in assisted migration is that neither origin nor function are on the spotlight. Rather, species rarity or danger of impending extinction is the key driver: species are decontextualized. This decontextualization operates as well at the level of knowledge production. Assisted migration is a technology devised by experts with little input from local actors (Pelai et al., 2021).

Here, the moral ecology turns back to a fully species-centered scheme, but instead of classical biological nativism principles, the space and time considered in the equation are not those of the present, but rather of the future. For a species susceptible to be the target of an assisted migration project, its present is no longer attached to their past ecological baseline, understood as the historical previous point in time of a given ecosystem (Alagona et al., 2012), but rather to a spatio-temporal dimension situated in future climatic scenarios. Conservation in general, and restoration ecology in particular, in the face of risk (Beck, 1992), have become liquid as well (Bauman, 2000) since it is no longer, if it were ever so, about ‘restoring’, but rather about designing and anticipating.

We have taken biological nativism as a geographical category that not only hinges on space and culture (Warren, 2023), but also on time. As such, combining space, culture, and time, scientifically induced biomobilities, including assisted migration, engage more with the notion of landscape than that of environment or ecosystem composed of biotic and abiotic elements devoid of sociocultural perception, apprehension, and valuation.

Biomobility as landscape design: Moral ecologies and species belonging

The actual outcome of these human-induced biomobilities is a symbolically and physically transformed landscape. As nature, even in a situation without human intervention, is in permanent change, there is not an unquestionable state of any given landscape that is the right one to protect, recover, or create anew. Every landscape has always been and is in permanent change (Pèlachs Mañosa et al., 2017). Conservation and restoration efforts choose a moment in time, the present, the past – 10 years, a century, or seven thousand years ago – or even the future, and try to protect or recreate that particular ecosystem and biodiversity assemblage. Some of the initiatives discussed in the previous pages, such as Pleistocene rewilding via taxon substitutes or functional analogues, are, in theory, more worried about the functionalities of an ecosystem, than the actual composition of the collection of species assembled (Jepson, 2025). The possible addition of hitherto unseen species adds a new potential format to the ecosystem that is not included in the tally of its past forms. Species translocation initiatives that bring old or new species to an area are actually creating new landscapes, beyond new ecosystems and ecological dynamics.

All of the above prompts us to talk about conservation, restoration, and human-induced biomobilities in general as landscape design (Beltran and Vaccaro, 2023). Broadly described as the process of devising actions aimed at improving previous situations (Sides, 2024), the term design has also been coupled with nature (Higgs, 2003) and, more recently, with the wild (Higgs and Hobbs, 2010; Martin, 2022) or wildness (Sides, 2024) to challenge the preconceptions of untouched wilderness or pristine nature (Cronon, 1996). However, when design is approached from a critical relational perspective, as ‘a form of inquiry unto itself, asking questions about how and why things are created, by whom, for whom, and the implications of these answers’ (Sides, 2024: 75), and when it is coupled with the notion of landscape, then it is fraught with new meanings emerging from human and nonhuman relations.

Design has been in the spotlight of restoration ecology since the 1960s, originally connected to the field of landscape architecture (Bush and Wolff, 2024), and sometimes conceived as tantamount to engineering. Ecological engineering, for instance, is defined as the ‘design, construction, operation, and management of landscape and aquatic structures and associated plant and animal communities to benefit humanity and nature’ (Barret in Seddon, 2010: 800). The concept emphasizes the extent to which ecosystems can be shaped and reshaped, involving the assemblage of new sets of species for the sake of biodiversity enhancement and ecological restructuration (Higgs, 2003). As such, particularly considering the rapid environmental changes that we will be facing now and in the near future, ecological engineering is likely to spread as the conceptual umbrella to allow for the introduction of species outside their historic distribution range.

Design implies to plan, to invent, to choose among options and bits and pieces in order to create and anticipate something new. The choices are guided by a particular sense of what is right and wrong in nature (Pauwelussen and Vandenberg, 2024). In this sense, landscape design is attached to a particular moral ecology which is always culturally context-dependent (Griffin et al., 2019). The landscape is the material manifestation of the interaction between humans and the biophysical environment, whose production ‘is not innocent of a politics’ (Darby, 2000: 9), embodying the integration between nature and culture. This is why ‘restoration ecologists must grapple with history and cultural identity when designing restoration projects’ (Alagona et al., 2012: 13. Our emphasis). By coupling design with landscape we highlight that restoration ecology is fraught with social, cultural, political, and legal assumptions that trespass the proper limits of ecology (Hall, 2010; Vaccaro et al., 2013).

Although design has been part of conservation initiatives from the outset, the scientifically induced biomobilities exposed here challenge some of the foundations of environmental conservation to date. Modern conservation, dating back to the creation of the Yellowstone National Park in 1872 as its myth of origin (Brockington et al., 2008), has historically been concerned with the idea of species belonging (Fry, 2023; Woods and Moriarty, 2001). A species was worth protecting because it was in danger of disappearing from its place. This premise was supported from either an intrinsic perspective (biodiversity loss), or from a functional standpoint, because the extinction of a species implied a cascade effect as other elements would not be able to perform its ecological function (ecological loss).

Moving species from their historic ranges to other habitats is about an active reconfiguration of not only ecosystems, but also landscapes; not only species, but also sociocultural values and emotions attached to those species and the resulting ecosystems. Species, in the conservation industry, have always been metaphors of something much bigger: degradation, hope, recovery, and much more. Species are mobilizing metaphors (Barua, 2011), metaphors that influence how we frame problems (Entman, 1993), particularly environmental conflicts (McCrow-Young et al., 2015; Wald and Peterson, 2020). In fact, all the terms preceding the description of a species, whether positive – keystone, flagship, umbrella, native, endemic – or negative – alien, invasive – ‘are inherently metaphorical’, and thus ‘have the ability to evoke concrete images and appeal to emotions’ (Barua, 2011: 1428). These terms are fundamental to understand landscape configurations, imbued with cultural meanings and power relations, beyond strict ecological relationships, but classic conservation (worried about the repair of the proper geographies of belonging) and new restoration ecology (focused on the reestablishment of the ecological functionality or compositionalism of degraded ecosystems, some of them yet to come) are constantly repurposing them, leaving aside crucial sociocultural aspects that allow us to better understand the degree of acceptance or rejection of a species translocation program and the resulting landscapes. As Hall (2010: 6) notes, while ‘a British alien plant’s degree of belonging apparently depends on its date of arrival’, species belonging is not only influenced by biological nativism nor its ecological role in the ecosystem, but rather by ‘its usefulness to people or their psychological attachment to it’.

Belonging has been connected to rights, the fundamental right of nonhuman species to exist, but it is also about moral ecologies and the feelings and emotions attached to landscape biographies. The concept of ‘interspecies belonging’ intends to encompass ‘a dynamic process of co-habitation, through which situated and spatiotemporally specific affective practices of humans and nonhuman species, are generative of an intimate and personal sense of belonging’ (Fry, 2023: 2510). This process reveals the extent to which to belong or not to belong to certain places should take into account not only the species original range, but also their ecological effects and, foremost, the cultural attachments to different social groups. The sense of species belonging is thus conditioned by broader political ecologies of land use, which shape both the materiality of affective practices, the emotive endowment of those practices, and their articulation politically in claims over what should belong and what should not.

Large mammals, but also trees (Chan et al., 2016), are not only valued because of their presence in a given ecosystem. Nor because of their function and the ensuing ecological dynamics, shaping trophic chains. They are also cherished because of their charisma and the relational values springing from and attached to them (Chan et al., 2018). It is not a coincidence that most of keystone and umbrella species, defined strictly in ecological terms, are also flagship species (Pons-Raga, 2024), ‘popular charismatic species that serve as symbols and rallying points to stimulate conservation awareness and action’ (Heywood in Barua, 2011: 1429).

An important point that must be underscored is that climate change destabilizes further the geographies of belonging paradigm as it questions the permanence of all ecosystems as the climatic framework is shifting and riddled with uncertainties. From a certain perspective, the entire globe is about to become a rapidly changing assemblage of new ecosystems. Belonging, place-based approaches, are about to become obsolete. The latest restoration framework, boosted by the ecological anxiety generated by the impact of climate change (Hickman, 2020) and epitomized by the proposal of assisted migration, moves beyond the canonical belonging paradigm based on biological nativism, adding new dimensions and layers to the study of biomobilites as landscape design via the concepts of moral ecologies and interspecies belonging. The temporal dimension of restoration ecology no longer gazes upon the past – we are not going back to an ideal past environment – and rather looks toward the future where everything can be, at least, plausible.

Concluding remarks: Beyond anticipatory ecology

Climate change, in its global and local manifestations is a powerful and empowering justification for public and private conservationist agency. As such, it has opened a window for change for restoration ecology through which the aim to preserve a species or an ecological function has taken new, previously unseen dimensions. It is important to underscore that species translocation schemes are not just scientific devises, deprived of ideological frameworks. They do not only move nonhuman individuals of a species from one locale to another, but they also connect them to the socioecological systems where they will be located, becoming imbricated with the imaginings that depict the ideal configuration for that particular landscape.

The case of bison rewilding in Spain, in regard to the previous preservationist and nostalgic phases, illustrates the moves undertaken and the challenges faced by species translocation schemes classified under the banner of restoration ecology 2.0. The paradigm shift embraced by these new schemes within restoration ecology can be synthesized as follows: the composition of species in a given ecosystem should give way to more pragmatic models in the pursuit of maintaining ecological dynamics and functions. Yet, the biological unit these programs work with is the quintessential unit of modern ecology: species (Arregui, 2024).

While assisted migration not only hinges on, but fully addresses the future-oriented paradigm proposed by the latest versions of restoration ecology, its complete orientation toward the future calls into question, or at least leans us toward a ‘significant widening [of] the very term of restoration’ (Hertog and Turnhout in Sides, 2024: 78). Although it is still claimed to pertain to the umbrella of restoration ecology by asserting that it seeks to ‘restore the conditions for the species to thrive’ (Buranyi, 2016), assisted migration can be plausibly considered a paradigmatic conservation scheme that epitomizes the shift from restoration to anticipatory ecology taking climate change as a threat not only of the future, but also of the present time. In this vein, assisted migration seems to make a temporal move that forces us to think of restoration ecology under a new vocabulary that better grasps its forward-looking principles in the era of climate emergency.

Finally, although ‘some ecologists have suggested that restoration is more effective when it focuses on the landscape as a whole’ (Alagona et al., 2012: 16), we need to bear in mind the central role species will keep playing in our environmental conservation rationales for two main reasons: one is epistemic, the other cultural. As long as restoration ecology unfolds under Western modern rationales, encompassing biological and legal principles, the central role of discrete biological units (i.e. species) will endure. Even though we seem increasingly inclined to consider ‘what animals and plants do [. . .] more than where they came from and how they arrived’ (Head in Warren, 2023: 305), our knowledge production framework on ecological dynamics is still founded upon the value of certain species. Culturally, species have been and will be not mere ecological elements devoid of social values. Moving species should not be understood as solely a struggle against biodiversity loss (e.g. assisted migration) or against the preservation of ecological dynamics (e.g. Pleistocene rewilding). Megafauna, but also some plant species and animals of smaller size carry with them key sociocultural meanings. Thus, their presence or absence in a given ecosystem not only alters the environment, it reshapes the landscapes through which we endow these environments with meaning.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities [Juan de la Cierva grant number JCD2022-048564-I; RERURP research project PID2021-125132NAI00].

Ethical considerations

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal participants.

ORCID iDs

Ferran Pons-Raga

Ismael Vaccaro

Author biographies

Ferran Pons-Raga is a social anthropologist interested in human–animal relations, socioecological conflicts, heritage-making, and rural transitions in Europe’s peripheral, mountain and island, territories. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork addressing the conflicts spurred around different biomobilities, namely the bear reintroduction program in the Pyrenees and the presence of outdoor cats in the Canary Islands.

Ismael Vaccaro is an environmental anthropologist and political ecologist, interested in landscape histories, socioecological conflicts, property theory, knowledge production, interactions between the urban and the rural, the emergence of post-industrial spaces, and anthropology of conservation and mining. He has conducted fieldwork in the Catalan Pyrenees, lakes of Uganda, Oaxaca, and the Solomon Islands.

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