Mr Adrian Colston: Beyond preservation: the challenge of ecological restoration: can you live with ambiguity or do you want to be in charge?

I will discuss various concepts of habitat creation employed in the East Anglian Fens, the Upper Fen Valley and the clay lands of Sussex. I will give each a theoretical base and then discuss the merits of each approach.

Two cases studies (The Wicken Fen Vision and Knepp Castle Wildlands) will show that habitat creation can provide many ecosystem services in addition to just biodiversity and that the approach taken at these two sites, which I have termed ‘constrained re-wilding’ might offer a more robust approach to wildlife conservation than the more pre-deterministic approaches that have been adopted elsewhere as we grapple with life in the Anthropocene.