Towards a Holistic and Standardised Approach to Measuring Rewilding

Last month, Rewilding Britain released its long-anticipated Rewilding Monitoring Framework, marking a significant step towards formalising how rewilding is measured, understood and communicated. Until now, there has been no shared standard for monitoring rewilding projects, which risks undermining its role in nature recovery.  

Rewilding is, by definition, an approach where nature leads – shaped by dynamic, long-term ecological processes. This creates a fundamental tension with conventional monitoring, which typically relies on fixed targets, predefined indicators and measurable outcomes. The framework responds to this challenge by offering a flexible, multi-dimensional approach that captures ecological, social and economic change together, providing a much-needed structure for evidencing progress while retaining the open-ended, process-led nature of rewilding.

The framework is organised around five overarching objectives: working at nature’s scale; letting nature lead; supporting people and nature together; creating resilient local economies; and securing benefits for the long term. Together, these objectives move beyond conventional conservation approaches, enabling practitioners to capture a more complete picture of change across a site.

Flexibility as a Defining Principle

Recognising the diversity of rewilding projects, the framework is deliberately designed to be adaptable. It offers a two-tier system of ‘essential’ and ‘desirable’ indicators, alongside a broader menu of metrics that can be tailored to different resources, scales and contexts. Supported by clear guidance on the “why, what, when, who and how” of monitoring, it enables practitioners to select approaches suited to their specific circumstances, spanning both quantitative measures – such as vegetation structure and species diversity – and more qualitative or intangible outcomes, including community perception and connection to nature.

This flexibility is critical. Rewilding projects range from large, contiguous landscapes to smaller, fragmented sites, each with different ecological baselines, governance structures and funding realities. A rigid, standardised monitoring system would risk being either unworkable or reductive.

Importantly, the framework also aligns monitoring with existing funding and policy mechanisms, including biodiversity net gain and carbon markets, helping landowners and land managers to streamline data collection. 

Scientific Robustness and Practical Guidance

A notable strength of the framework is its grounding in established scientific methodologies. It promotes robust approaches such as baseline data collection, stratified sampling and the Before–After Control–Impact (BACI) design as a “gold standard” for ecological monitoring.

This emphasis on methodological rigour is essential for building credibility, particularly in a field that still faces scepticism in some quarters. By encouraging consistent, comparable data collection over time, the framework strengthens the evidence base for rewilding and supports more informed decision-making, funding applications and policy development.

At the same time, it recognises that not all outcomes can – or should – be reduced to quantitative metrics. The inclusion of approaches such as community-based monitoring and “Most Significant Change” storytelling highlights the importance of capturing lived experience, perception and cultural value alongside ecological data. 

Adapting the Framework to Urban Wilding

When considering how the framework might be applied to urban wilding, a range of additional possibilities begins to emerge.

Urban environments bring distinct conditions that can expand and enrich the framework’s application. Sites are often smaller, more fragmented and shaped by overlapping land uses, complex ownership patterns and diverse communities. They also tend to involve higher levels of human presence and interaction, creating dynamic and layered relationships between people and nature.

Within this context, the framework’s existing indicators remain highly relevant. Ecological measures such as species diversity, soil health and hydrology translate well, while social indicators – such as those related to wellbeing, access to nature and community engagement – may take on even greater significance in urban settings. Economic indicators, including local enterprise and skills development, are equally applicable.

At the same time, urban contexts open up opportunities to extend the framework in ways that respond to these specific conditions.

Expanding the role of human management

In urban wilding, “letting nature lead” often operates alongside ongoing stewardship. This creates an opportunity to more explicitly explore gradients of human management – how intervention shifts over time, how it supports ecological processes, and how it responds to public use and perception. The framework’s existing human management metrics provide a useful starting point, which could be further developed to reflect these urban dynamics.

Integrating urban environmental conditions

Urban sites are shaped by factors such as air quality, noise, soil contamination and microclimate. Incorporating these into monitoring approaches could deepen understanding of how rewilding interacts with wider environmental conditions, and how it contributes to improving them.

Deepening understanding of human-nature relationships

The intensity of human presence in cities offers a unique opportunity to capture rich insights into how people experience and engage with rewilded spaces. Building on existing social indicators, monitoring could further explore patterns of use, perceptions of safety and comfort, cultural meaning, and evolving relationships between communities and urban nature.

Rethinking scale and connectivity

While the framework emphasises working at nature’s scale, urban wilding invites a complementary perspective – focusing on core sites, corridors and stepping stones. Applying the framework at both site and city scale could help capture how smaller interventions contribute to wider ecological connectivity and resilience. Policy will play a key enabling role, with the UK’s Local Nature Recover Strategy (LNRS) policies setting a new benchmark for how urban areas can improve connectivity at the city-scale.

Adapting ecological trajectories

Urban contexts may also encourage different expressions of “letting nature lead”, where ecological processes are supported through designed interventions or analogues. This offers an opportunity to broaden how rewilding trajectories are understood and monitored, particularly in environments where full species reintroductions or large-scale processes are not feasible.

Taken together, these specifically urban considerations highlight the framework’s potential as a foundation that can be meaningfully extended into urban contexts. Its flexibility already allows for adaptation; what emerges is an opportunity to further develop its application in cities – perhaps through a dedicated urban addendum – where rewilding is often as much about relationships, experience and coexistence as it is about ecological recovery.

Overall, the framework will play a vital role in bringing greater consistency to the field; its role in helping to standardise monitoring across rewilding projects is an important step towards enabling knowledge to be shared, outcomes to be compared, and a stronger, evidence-based case for rewilding to be built over time.