TERRANOVA is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network. It aims at improving our long-term understanding of ecosystem and landscape histories, and land-use strategies and impacts in Europe in the Holocene and Anthropocene, and takes special interest in developing the basis for mainstreaming rewilding into European landscape management. Previously identified socio-cultural transitions and the effects of natural forcings will be critically assessed. Regional and continental syntheses will be used to anchor a new generation of landscape and climate change models, which include the effects of past human actions and generate scenarios for landscape management and rewilding. Ultimately, this project aims to contribute research and training to the needed future transition to a low carbon society, addressing the joint current climate and biodiversity crises.
These efforts will be realized through a new interdisciplinary arena created by the TERRANOVA project, constituted by its interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral consortium and 15 new PhD positions. The TERRANOVA consortium consists of eight universities, three NGOs and three companies. The non-academic beneficiaries include IUCN, the world’s oldest and largest global environmental organization, and Rewilding Europe, currently working in 13 different European countries and connecting rewilding initiatives in more than 20 European countries, and together with the academic beneficiaries form an unprecedented inter-sectoral consortium for training the next generation of scientists, policy makers, and entrepreneurs.
Two of the PhD projects – on natural ecosystem baselines and on megafauna dynamics – will be localized in BIOCHANGE with Jens-Christian Svenning as the main supervisor and Signe Normand as local co-supervisor, with further two PhD projects at other institutions co-supervised by Jens-Christian Svenning. This project contributes to theme [1] Fundamental Biodiversity Dynamics and theme [4] Interdisciplinary Innovation of BIOCHANGE.
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