Elena Pearce, former postdoc and now affiliated researcher at ECONOVO, is currently cycling from London to Singapore. Along the way, she’ll be sending occasional updates to ECONOVO reflecting on the wild nature, biodiversity and novel ecosystems she encounters en route!
The Loire, known as France’s last wild river, is a cool example of wild nature and human life coexisting in close proximity. Passing through major cities like Orléans, Tours, and Nantes, it remains largely untamed, shaped by seasonal floods and shifting sandbanks. Between 2018 and 2025, the LIFE Loire en Forez project has been restoring a 30 km stretch, remobilising sediments and improving natural flow, while efforts since 2020 to remove groynes are rebalancing the riverbed.
Restoration of secondary water bodies connected to the river is enhancing biodiversity and reconnecting communities with revitalised waterways. Meanwhile, Atlantic salmon, long absent, are returning through reintroduction efforts. The Loire is a beautiful place, and a great reminder that wildness can thrive even in the heart of human settlements.
Velebit mountains. Home to wolf, bear and lynx, the Velebit Mountains are a vast spread of wild nature rarely seen in Europe today. We cycled past limestone peaks, karst fields, and cloud forests of beech, silver fir, elm and rowan, where the high elevation caused endless rain. The shrub layer was full of honeysuckle, buckthorn, Alpine rose, mezereon and laburnum. Calamint, wood sorrel, cuckoo flower, navelwort and spurges covered the ground.
The Velebit Mountains are protected both as a national park and the a core area of Rewilding Velebit - part of the wider Rewilding Europe initiative. Efforts here focus on restoring natural processes and promoting coexistence between people and wildlife. Natural grazing is being re-established with free-roaming Tauros and semi-wild horses, supporting mosaic habitats and boosting biodiversity. The area now spans 30,000 hectares under wildlife-friendly management, with hunting concessions being repurposed towards a wildlife-based economy. Red deer have been reintroduced, lynx populations are being reinforced through the LIFE Lynx project, and camera traps monitor animal movements. Additional work includes restoring water sources, mapping bear dens, and reducing wildlife-vehicle collisions.
The work at Velebit is so impressive, and all part of a broader transition towards ecological restoration and resilience. It was a magical place to visit!
Kerkini Lake National Park
Close to the Belasitsa mountains and the Bulgarian border, Kerkini is a human-made wetland that has become an important bird habitat. Created in the 1930s by damming the Strymonas River, the lake now supports over 200 bird species, including pelicans, spoonbills, egrets, grebes, storks, and cormorants. Most famously, it hosts one of the largest breeding colonies of Dalmatian pelicans in the world.
Kerkini is a Ramsar site and part of the Natura 2000 network. The mosaic of grasslands, riparian forests, and extensive reedbeds is shaped by both water management and grazing. Free-ranging water buffalo, an integral part of local livelihoods, graze seasonally in the wet meadows, maintaining open habitats vital for waders and amphibians. We also saw semi-wild horses and cattle.
Conservation efforts focus on managing water levels to support nesting and feeding grounds, controlling reedbed encroachment, and working with local fishers and farmers to reduce conflict. The National Park authority and NGOs are also installing artificial nesting platforms, tracking pelican movements, and restoring riparian forests. Despite the artificial origins of the lake, it’s a clear case of how ecological value can emerge from altered landscapes - and how active stewardship can allow wild nature to flourish in an agricultural region.
Shepherds and their dogs
Cycling across the length of central Turkey and then heading North East into Georgia, we were never far from flocks of sheep or goats. And where there were sheep, there were shepherd dogs! Big, sandy Kangals with black muzzles guard the herds in central Anatolia, while further east near the Georgian border we saw heavy-coated Caucasian shepherd dogs, bred for the mountains. Both these breeds have been shaped over many centuries to protect livestock from wolves and bears.
In Turkey, Georgia and elsewhere, controlled studies and long-term programmes have shown that livestock guarding dogs can substantially reduce livestock losses to large carnivores and change predator behaviour. They create a non-lethal buffer that reduces retaliatory killing and opens space for carnivores to persist near people. At the same time, results are context-dependent: dog training, shepherding practice, and landscape use all influence success, but the benefits definitely seem to outweigh the costs (check out some super cool work by Bethany Smith that was published recently on this: https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.70120).
For rewilding, these active systems of cultural land use matter. Bringing back or protecting carnivores only works if people living alongside them have reliable ways to manage conflict. Shepherds and their dogs show how local knowledge and culture can be part of the solution - creating space for wild nature while sustaining pastoral livelihoods.
We often talk about “bringing back predators” or “restoring natural grazing.” What I saw here was a reminder that people and their practices are already part of that picture. Shepherds and their dogs are managing grazing while also holding the line against conflict. If we want rewilding to succeed, supporting these systems might be just as important as any species reintroduction.
For us though, two huge dog lovers on bicycles, the dogs were absolutely terrifying. They took their job very seriously! Walkers didn’t seem to have any problems, but moving fast on two wheels, and not looking very human in our silhouettes, made us a big threat to them. It was a sharp reminder that coexistence isn’t always comfortable - but it works, which is what counts.
The Bartang Valley in Tajikistan was definitely the most remote place we have visited on the trip! The road breaks up often, disappearing into scree or a full river. We carried our bikes through very fast, very cold, waist-deep river crossings many times! Cars are rare and frequently can’t get through. For the first half of the valley, villages sit on small flats above the river, and in-between there are long stretches of loose rock and dust. In the second half of the valley the villages disappeared, and we saw no one but one jeep in three days.
People here live by livestock. Sheep, goats, and sometimes cattle and yaks graze the areas that wild mountain goats and the remaining wild sheep also use. Several people told us the wild animals are in trouble because domestic stock occupies the best pasture. That competition really matters, because fewer wild prey makes predator conflict with herders much more likely.
We were in the valley in summer, so seeing a snow leopard was unlikely. They stay high in the mountains until the colder months and then come lower in winter. We didn’t see one, but what we did get were very different accounts of what happens when they come down. One man said there is effectively no government support when a leopard takes animals and that retaliatory shootings have happened after losses. Another told us that hunting has been illegal for many years, and that enforcement has become stricter in roughly the last decade. He said numbers appear to be improving a little. A family told us about a leopard that entered their corral and killed around twenty goats. They trapped it inside the corral and called specialists, who relocated it higher up. When we asked why, the son shrugged and told us that if livestock animals die it’s usually the shepherd’s fault for not watching them properly, not the leopard’s fault: “God made them too,” he said. Most people also said wolves are the more common problem, but that the presence of a shepherd prevents attacks.
There are official and project-level responses. Tajikistan has a national framework for snow leopard conservation and takes part in regional initiatives. Donor-funded projects have supported predator-proof corrals, small monitoring schemes, trials of insurance or compensation, and occasional translocations. NGOs and regional agencies back this work. But it is patchy. It depends on external funding and local initiative. Enforcement is stricter than it used to be, but there is no consistent, valley-wide system to support herders after losses.
On the ground you see the results of that mix. There are reinforced corrals at some villages, an occasional poster about conservation, homestays that promote snow-leopard work, and a local biologist doing his best to direct small sums of compensation to affected families. In short: law, projects and goodwill exist, but they don’t form anything close to a reliable safety net for herders.
Travelling through the valley made those gaps clearer than any report could. So much depends on the individual shepherd, and on whether a project has reached a village or not. It isn’t a simple story of local people versus predators, or of conservation success. It’s more ordinary than that: people trying to keep their animals alive in a place where the margins are thin. We left Bartang with a clearer sense of what coexistence actually looks like when you’re living inside it.
