This is the final post in a series exploring how we use explaining how we work at the Lifescape Project, how we use different skills, and - most importantly - how we collaborate and combine our five core areas of expertise to tackle the complex challenge of the biodiversity crisis.
The other posts in this series can be found here:
Using the law to protect wild landscapes
Natural Capital: Valuing Wild Landscapes
Up in the Scottish Highlands, a little over three miles from the shores of Loch Ness, the Natural Capital Laboratory at Birchfield – our rewilding project, committed back to nature by owners Roger and Emilia Leese – is set within a striking landscape. A road runs through the site, cutting it into two separate fenced enclosures. The lower part spreads down a slope towards a thin river that marks the perimeter. On the other side of the glen, peaks rise, lumpen and rocky, up towards the clouds. If you’re lucky, you might see a golden eagle circling nearby.
The setting is beautiful, but it is bare. It may not look this way at first. The ground in the lower section is thickly covered with rough grass. Newly staked saplings are seeking to establish themselves. On some steeply sloped parts, gnarly old silver birch trees that give the estate its name are home to red squirrels. Frogs hop along the boggy ground. Deer roam the site. But look closer and you can also see tree stumps scattered throughout the site, left from when a previous cover of plantation spruce was felled. These trees would, in turn, have decades ago replaced bare ground browsed by sheep, which themselves replaced native forest that would have grown here. Except for the few aged birches in hard-to-reach areas, these native trees and the ecosystem they would have supported are missing.
Look now at a screen filled with a computer-generated habitat thick with Scots pine, oak, and rowan. Close by is a large elk, somewhat blocky but recognisable, sunlight streaming through its antlers. The ground is rich with ferns, mosses, and liverworts, each one based on a field sample collected from the site, analysed, and identified before being inserted into the simulation. This is the Natural Capital Laboratory 50 to 100 years from now, as imagined through the project’s virtual reality showpiece.
This blog is part of a series that sets out the five pillars around which we structure our work at the Lifescape Project: Economics, Science, Law, Culture, and Technology. Our focus in this blog is the latter two – culture and technology. The way we make use of technology at Lifescape is bound up in the ways we advocate for the cultural benefits of rewilding, so here we write about these thematic pillars together.
Rewilding is a vision for a world rich in wild landscapes that provide a sustainable future for life on earth. At Lifescape, this means our work focuses on the creation and restoration of wild landscapes. We hope that the young saplings at Birchfield will grow into a mature native woodland. Across all our projects, we aim to support the changes required to return lost ecological diversity at a landscape scale.
Talking about change is layered – it stirs hope, resistance, and everything in between. As rewilders, when we look upon a deforested landscape or a thick plantation of a single type of non-native spruce, it is easy to be caught up in the excitement of what this land might be. We imagine the range of life it might support if only we could roll back the human interventions that have made it this way and let natural processes take over. It is also easy to overlook the fact that de-wilded landscapes have their own set of users and can support deep cultural histories and ways of life. People have come to love them as they are now. Ecological change towards wilder landscapes can be felt a cultural loss.
Putting culture at the heart of what we do at Lifescape is a way of trying to work with, not against, people for whom the changes brought about by rewilding are a source of concern. In our vision for a wilder world, we want to see cultures that appreciate, support and promote wild nature in their landscapes. This means that for us, rewilding is about creating landscapes that provide space for all sorts of lives and activities, whether people, animals, plants or fungi. Birchfield provides a classroom without walls for schools, tour groups, and others to explore and learn. We encourage walkers (and their dogs) to visit the site. In rewilded spaces, people should continue to be beneficiaries of nature, as well as its carers, students, and companions.
We believe in shaping rewilding so that it includes people, but inviting people to embrace a wilder future is not without its challenges. It takes around 40 years for an oak tree to reach maturity - a reminder that ecological change generally unfolds on a timescale far beyond our own. The inclusive future promised by rewilding is a long way away. Some of today’s generations are unlikely to see it come to pass. In the meantime, it is very easy to see only the immediate cultural impacts.
This is where we make creative use of technology to help bring the future closer. It can be hard to think about what a landscape may look like after we’re gone. With the help of colleagues at our partners AECOM, by using virtual reality at Birchfield, we were able to make the future a bit more within reach. Importantly, this is more than just an artist’s impression. Ecologists carefully surveyed the site to document the plant species already present, so that developers could bring these into the virtual world. This world itself was built with data from drone surveys that are used to produce 3D maps of the Birchfield site. Technology allows us to show a future that people beyond those involved in rewilding projects can get behind.
Put on the VR headset and step into our virtual Birchfield, and you might even find yourself face to face with an elk. It’s a reminder that rewilding often means bringing lost species back through reintroduction—restoring the animals that once shaped these landscapes. As is evident in the presence in the UK of ospreys and beavers, bison and the large blue butterfly – all species that until recently had been driven from our shores by hunting and habitat loss – reintroductions can provide a boost to the ecosystem, alongside the slow process of habitat succession alone. But when reintroductions take place within a cultural landscape, it’s important to consider and address any concerns for the impacts they may have.
At Lifescape, this is a core part of our work on The Missing Lynx Project. The Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) once roamed the British countryside. They have been missing from our landscapes likely since around the twelfth century. In their absence, herbivores such as deer (a lynx’s favourite prey) proliferate, causing problems for other wildlife as well as economic loss for foresters. The Missing Lynx Project is a first step to investigate the feasibility of reintroducing lynx into a forest patch in Northumberland and bordering parts of Cumbria and southern Scotland. The idea of sharing space with an apex carnivore, however, raises concerns amongst sheep farmers, for whom this landscape is both their life and livelihood.
Technology is an essential tool for supporting our case that a rewilded Northumberland, home to farmers, sheep, and lynx, is a culturally and ecologically enriched landscape. Across several months in 2024 and 2025, we toured the region with The Missing Lynx Project roadshow. This exhibition made use of large, interactive displays that invited visitors to find out more about lynx ecology and see the benefits that their presence might bring, as well as directly engaging with the worries of different communities.
Generating ecological visions of the future are just one important way in which we use technology at Lifescape. Another essential role for tech that we have been experimenting with at Birchfield is its capacity for allowing us to better understand the present. At the start of the Natural Capital Laboratory project, we painstakingly surveyed the whole site in a practice known as baselining. This involved using aerial imagery to assess tree density, drones to map the site, camera traps to detect elusive mammals, bio-acoustic monitoring to understand the birds and bats, and a novel technique known as environmental DNA surveying that can identify species presence by picking up genetic traces of organisms in soil, water, or even air.
Field ecologists bring the sharp eye and deep knowledge that only hands-on experience can provide. ‘Nature tech’, however, allows us to scale up what an ecologist by themselves is able to achieve - capturing patterns beyond what the human eye can see, filling in the gaps between observations, and revealing changes over time. We can generate data in more ways, over longer periods of time, and with greater continuity. This data is essential for showing us what the ecosystem is missing and what it might become.
There is no simple path out of the biodiversity crisis we find ourselves in. Rewilding offers one essential way of combatting this loss and restoring our nature-depleted landscapes to ones that nurture and sustain all life. But if in the past we have perhaps pursued cultural interests at the expense of ecological ones, we cannot now make the same mistake in reverse. At Lifescape, we believe that rewilding is both a cultural and an ecological vision for the future. A core part of our mission is to help build a culture that embraces the wild side of both landscape and spirit, by communicating the range of values that it can bring.
To support our ecological work, we draw upon different technologies to understand our present situation and to envision the hopeful futures at the heart of rewilding. By doing so, we are working to turn the imagined and virtual, into reality.
This blog post is the third in a series explaining how we work at the Lifescape Project, how we use different skills, and - most importantly - how we collaborate and combine our five core areas of expertise to tackle the complex challenge of the biodiversity crisis.
This blog post is the second in a series explaining how we work at the Lifescape Project, how we use different skills, and - most importantly - how we collaborate and combine our five core areas of expertise to tackle the complex challenge of the biodiversity crisis.
Introducing the unique multi-disciplinary model followed by The Lifescape Project, combining expertise in science, technology, law, economics, and communications.
