It is a great pleasure to invite you to GreenFrontier annual talk Rewilding, Science and Uncertainty: Habitat controversies in the case of the European bison to be delivered by Dr Monica Vasile from Oulu University, Finland.

This talk argues that rewilding often presents itself as science-led, but its decisions are rarely settled by scientific evidence. Rewilding promises action in damaged landscapes. It asks conservationists to bring species back and rebuild ecological functions. But this promise rests on a difficult problem: rewilding acts before the science is settled. Scientific evidence is often incomplete or contradictory, and ecological futures are uncertain. Yet rewilding actors still decide which species belong where, what counts as suitable habitat, and when action is justified. The key issue becomes not whether rewilding has enough science behind it, but how uncertain science is negotiated or strategically presented until it can authorise intervention.

The talk focuses on the European bison, one of rewilding’s great success stories. Once extinct in the wild, it now stands as a flagship species for Europe’s rewilded landscapes: saved, restored and cast as ecologically useful. But the same animal is also described as misplaced, a refugee species, a poor fit for some habitats, and a troublemaker, a source of human-wildlife conflict. How can one species be both proof of rewilding’s promise and evidence of its uncertainty? Scientific controversy has centred on whether the bison is primarily a forest or grassland species, how its evolutionary past should be read, and what its adaptations mean for restoration futures. Through this case, the talk shows that rewilding does not rest on stable scientific ideas of habitat, evolutionary ancestry, or ecological function. Its scientific backbone is far less settled than its public language suggests.

Speaker’s bio

Monica Vasile is an environmental historian and anthropologist currently based at the University of Oulu, Finland. Her research examines how species recovery, reintroduction, rewilding, and ecological restoration have been shaped by scientific knowledge and changing ideas about animals and nature in the long twentieth century. Some of her publications related to the topic of reintroductions and rewilding are: Monica Vasile. “Beyond Homecoming: The Reintroduction of Seven Przewalski’s Mares in the Gobi Desert” Environmental Humanities 17(2): 482-505 (2025). Monica Vasile. “From Reintroduction to Rewilding: Autonomy, Agency, and the Messy Liberation of the European Bison.” Environment and History 30(1): 105-129 (2024). Monica Vasile, “The Vulnerable Bison: Practices and Meanings of Rewilding in the Romanian Carpathians,” Conservation and Society 16(3): 217–31 (2018).