Jonas Skutka, Author at Rewilding Academy https://rewilding.academy/author/jonas/ Fri, 17 Oct 2025 11:00:58 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://rewilding.academy/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/favicon-150x150.png Jonas Skutka, Author at Rewilding Academy https://rewilding.academy/author/jonas/ 32 32 Nature Positive Tourism: A Path Towards Sustainable Travel https://rewilding.academy/interviews/path-towards-sustainable-travel/ Tue, 13 Jun 2023 13:30:04 +0000 https://rewilding.academy/?p=7377 As the world becomes increasingly aware of the environmental impact of tourism, there is a growing demand for...

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]]> As the world becomes increasingly aware of the environmental impact of tourism, there is a growing demand for sustainable travel options that prioritize the protection of wildlife and habitats. In response to this need, the Nature Positive Tourism courses have been designed to empower individuals and businesses in the tourism industry to build a regenerative future that benefits both entrepreneurs and nature. Through a comprehensive training program, participants gain invaluable insights and practical experiences that enable them to actively contribute to the conservation of wildlife and habitats, while fostering partnerships with local communities. 

In this interview with the Nature-positive tourism course leaders, we delve into the core principles and unique offerings of the course, highlighting the transformative mindset shift and sustainable practices that participants acquire along the way.

Participants of the nature positive tourism field course are observing wildlife on top of a mountain in the Italian Apennines.

How does your course/training on Nature Positive Tourism contribute to building a regenerative industry that benefits nature, communities and tourism entrepreneurs?

We believe that a mutually beneficial partnership between nature and people is critical, to ensure a long-term sustainable future. By stimulating a positive relationship between nature and local communities, we believe that tourism provides communities with the opportunity to remain authentic while integrating closely with wild nature. 

We encourage a hands-on tourism experience where guests not only contribute to nature and communities, but add value by sharing experiences with local enterprises. We also want our participants to leave feeling responsible for ensuring the future of not only the natural areas they have visited but also the people who live in those areas. 

As a Foundation we have made a conscious decision to contribute 10% of all training revenue back to nature, and to people who will benefit from this Nature Positive Tourism training.

In your course, you mention the significance of community engagement and partnerships in nature-positive tourism. Could you elaborate on the role of local communities and businesses and how your course helps participants strengthen these partnerships?

Our training provides first-hand learning and experience on:

  • how beneficial, authentic community partnerships are, 
  • recognizing the value of long-term partnerships, 
  • accepting local partnerships for the value they have and bring (and allowing them time to develop organically)
  • appreciating the value and importance of local culture

By delivering training in these areas with local partners, we provide the local partners with a direct impact on their businesses but also stimulate positive conversation around the role and relationship that they have with nature.

The field training portion of your course focuses on providing firsthand experiences and learnings in wildlife tourism, nature conservation, and rewilding efforts. How do these practical experiences enable participants to actively contribute to the protection and support of wildlife and habitats?

We hope that the firsthand experiences create connectivity between participants and the areas and conservation efforts we take them to, forging an emotional understanding of how valuable these examples are and then providing them with examples and ways to stimulate and support these conservation efforts. It helps to open them up to a greater opportunity to have an impact. 

Just by taking this training, participants actively contribute to local communities and businesses and have a direct impact on nature (as part of their training fee is directly contributed to local conservation efforts).

One of the course objectives is to introduce participants to the concept of being “nature positive” and the mindset shift required. Could you explain how your course facilitates this mindset shift and equips participants to align their businesses with nature-positive practices?

The courses are designed to bring people closer to nature, using specially crafted moments in nature to connect people to the wild, which allows them to understand the critical role they play in ensuring nature’s protection. 

Using international examples and experience we provide participants with insights and learnings that show how positive engagement with nature can be created.

 These learnings include financial responsibility and contribution, selecting and stimulating the right partnerships (both locally and internationally), and being bold enough to market truly sustainable tourism offerings.

Embrace Nature Positive Tourism

Join us on this transformative journey and become a force for change in the world of travel. Sign up now, and by enrolling in this course, you contribute 3-5% of the fees to support our projects, enabling us to expand our training opportunities to individuals in economically disadvantaged regions. Together, we can create a positive impact and work towards a sustainable future for our planet.

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]]> Fascinating fungi questions and answers https://rewilding.academy/ecosystem-restoration/fascinating-fungi-questions/ Thu, 24 Nov 2022 17:13:09 +0000 https://rewilding.academy/?p=6137 On behalf of the Rewilding Community of Practice, we are excited to report on the ‘Fascinating Fungi –...

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On behalf of the Rewilding Community of Practice, we are excited to report on the ‘Fascinating Fungi – Invisible Allies in Rewilding event‘. It was an excellent opportunity to learn about the latest findings and developments in the fields of mycology and rewilding, both from science and practice. Our speakers presented nuanced views on the role of rewilding for fungi and vice versa.

We were thrilled to see this was an interesting topic for you and we thank you for attending and actively engaging with the speakers at the event.

After the speakers’ presentations, we held a Q&A session, at which you had many interesting questions directed at the speakers.

We didn’t find the time to answer all of them live, so the Rewilding Community of Practice reached out to the speakers* to have them answer your questions for you. If you missed the event, make sure to watch the recording.

speakers at the Fascinating Fungi Event

David Satori

Former Species Conservation Researcher at the Royal Botanic Gardens and founder of Rewilding Mycology.

Michael J. Hathaway

Matsutake Worlds Reserch Group, Author of ‘What a mushroom lives for?’

Bethan Manley​

Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN)

All you wanted to know about fungi and rewilding

David Satori

The Wood Wide Web, an idea that’s been around for almost as long as I have, has caught the imaginations of many mushroom enthusiasts, especially now that mycology is having a moment out in the public square. The WWW sparks debate amongst seasoned mycologists, who argue of its inaccuracy and misconception. So let’s take the time to explore my views on this, shall we?

For our intents and purposes, the World Wide Web is more or less a decentralised network distributed across space in which nodes on that network (people) can connect with almost every other node and exchange information.

Let’s contrast that to a woodland, and for now let’s stick to the case of ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi – those that form characteristic mushrooms in the autumn like this Orange Oak Bolete. A single tree can host several dozen species of ECM fungi, and within each species there may be multiple genetic individuals so that the tree may effectively be harbouring hundreds of individual fungi. Some of those ECM fungi will be associating only with that tree, and some will be associating with multiple trees, but all of them will be transferring nutrients from the soil into the tree based on source-sink gradients.

These fungi can detect self from non-self, and they’re not able to fuse together to form a large continuous mat of mycelium in which nutrients flow freely. They’re individualised, and in fact, can sometimes display competitive behaviour when it comes to root tip colonisation. So the Wood Wide Web is really a collective of countless individuals, and is very different from the free flowing structure of the internet.

So what do I think of the wood wide web? I think it’s a useful heuristic that people can intuitively grasp to speed up their understanding on the topic, even if that doesn’t take them to a complete understanding. What other three-word analogies can you think of that are as swift at bringing people to 50% of an understanding of the topic? You’ll be hard pressed to find anything that comes close to that, and I trust that anyone who is committed to learning more about fungi will eventually develop a more accurate and nuanced view.

Michael J. Hathaway

I guess the first thing to say is that such debates are part and parcel of healthy scientific discourse. In my anthropological training, I don’t think that any statement is proven, rather they can be more or less resistant to challenges from others. Some statements have survived massive challenges, and other statements are pulled down and quickly discarded. I am grateful for Simmard’s work in getting us to ask new sets of questions that sometimes push back on certain deep assumptions about how the world works.

One of the really interesting aspects to these debates is the question of scale, what is the scale of the scientific claim? Is someone saying that these forms of sharing are happening between a few trees of a few species in the Pacific Northwest? Are they saying this is a general principle of all forest interactions? Or is this a general principle of ecological relations writ large? For at least a century, there has been a common assumption from the Anglo-American tradition that life is fundamentally competitive, and so it isn’t surprising that some of Simmard’s claims might elicit a strong response. When there were claims that trees might preferentially provide resources to their kin, this seemed to better fit a model of competitive struggles for resources, but it is also interesting to figure out how this might happen (i.e. if trees are growing by seeds, how is it that they recognize their own kin and might preferentially supply nutrients to them?). Scientists who work deeply with symbiotic relations have been learning more and more about the complexity of such relations that don’t always neatly fit into existing categories such as parasitic or beneficial relations, especially as such relations may change depending on the context and so forth. I’m agnostic about the specific claims to what Simmard or others put forth on the wood wide web, especially recognizing that the knowledge on this topic is rapidly changing, and would encourage further research.

Bethan Manley

The Wood Wide Web concept has really done wonders for the field of mycorrhizal research. I wouldn’t imagine that we would have such an exploration of mycorrhizal networks in bestselling novels, TV, and countless documentaries without it. 

There is a general consensus in the scientific community that it’s highly likely shared fungal networks do exist. However, we just don’t have a lot of scientific evidence on what they do, and there hasn’t yet been direct evidence of them moving resources between different individual trees or plants. We do have a responsibility as scientists to be transparent about situations where a popular concept or idea has little scientific backing. The trouble is that the way a lot of the media I mentioned has portrayed this concept is that it is a concrete fact in science that trees share resources, yet there is almost a complete lack of science to back this up. 

Equally, from the perspective of fungal biologists, the WWW concept is a tree-centric way of seeing an ecosystem. It doesn’t give fungi any agency or pay attention to the fact that fungi are complex organisms with their own evolutionary history. So we also need to put as much energy into understanding what the fungi are doing, and what they want, as what the trees are doing.

There’s so much to learn about shared mycorrhizal networks and how they operate in relation to their plant hosts, and this is a really exciting question to shed more light on.

Michael J. Hathaway

At the global level, there are lots of creative experiments happening. In terms of their distribution throughout the world, there are certain hot spots. There is a long history of medicinal use of fungi, especially in Asia, but we could argue that (apart from fungally created penicillin) that the West has systematically underexplored and underfunded medical possibilities.  

Michael J. Hathaway

That’s an interesting question, and likely true. I would assume that it would really be a place-specific question and another big question is how do we want to value rewilding, do we want to create our own hierarchy in a given place, or would be want to say any species is equal with each other? I was intrigued by David’s comment that in the UK some are working towards the “biodiversity net gain,” and I was wondering if people are thinking about the relative value of various species presence, or is each species counted as equal? Going for equality starts to get really tricky really fast when one starts to include microbes.

Michael J. Hathaway

Likely a kind of assessment about microbial health would vary dramatically between different ecosystems. Perhaps there will be studies to look at what are assumed to be model “healthy ecosystems” and then do microbial studies, but it might be hard to make generalizations over too much distance. In general, the question of “health” is really tricky but for sure important. In humans, it is sometimes looked at as ‘the absence of disease,’ but we know that this is a very limited understanding, and I would assume that many ecosystems that many experts would describe as healthy also have lots of lots of existing diseases, which is actually part of the diversity itself.

Bethan Manley

Totally agreed with Michael, what is a ‘healthy’ microbial community will differ hugely between ecosystems. Part of what we want to establish at SPUN is which mycorrhizal fungi make up a healthy ecosystem in different biomes of the world, as a baseline for restoration of degraded ecosystems. This is a really tricky thing to establish, but the more data we gather, hopefully the more we can understand which species are our key players across different regions and biomes.

David Satori

The best way of introducing native fungi for the purposes of restoration is to co-introduce them with their plant hosts, as they’re unable to survive in the absence of a symbiotic partnership. However, if we’re considering drought conditions, previous research has found that low rainfall actually hindered both plant and fungal colonisation capacity, and once the ground was sufficiently hydrated, there was no need to inoculate with mycorrhizal fungi as they managed to naturally disperse into those environments themselves. On smaller scales (e.g., gardens or small farms), there’s a case to be made that mulching with myceliated wood chip or straw can be both beneficial in terms of moisture retention, but also nutrient enhancement for plants growing in their vicinity.

Questions you asked Bethan Manley​

“There is a general consensus in the scientific community that it’s highly likely shared fungal networks do exist. However, we just don’t have a lot of scientific evidence on what they do[…]”

Bethan Manley

We have a thriving research community of SPUN Science Associates that is growing every day, and these are really the crucial component of how we increase our data on mycorrhizal community composition throughout the world, so we always encourage anyone who studies soil, fungi, or mycorrhizae to get involved. Aside from scientists, we are incredibly keen on getting more people involved in some form of practical citizen science approach. Join the SPUN newsletter and watch this space! In the meantime, we always encourage people to get involved in their local mycological societies and to see what’s going on in their local areas for fungal rewilding – we want people to form their own mycological networks!

We do – and as I’m sure you can imagine, it looks very different to the EMF map. It’s remarkable to be able to visualise the differences in the predictions for these distinct mycorrhizal types. However, the AMF map is based on ITS amplicon sequencing data, which many people will know does not capture AMF diversity particularly well, though it’s great for EMF. Because of this, the AMF map is not based on as much data as we’d like, and we’re working to change this. We have started using AMF-specific primers as well as general fungal ITS primers for all of our samples, and hopefully soon this will give us much more in-depth knowledge on AMF species and their distributions across the globe.

We are interested in total diversity, but we will always include new sequences in our assessments, too, this is very interesting to us. The trouble with this work is the question – what is an AMF species? These fungi have hundreds of nuclei per cell, many of which have different DNA sequences, and there are different isolates that can look like different species. Without morphological data through culturing, which is very very difficult for these obligate symbionts, we can’t register new AMF species, but we certainly can assess which different sequences are out there.

I have no idea sadly! Something I’d love to look into.

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]]> Wolf pups in the South Veluwe of the Netherlands: the fourth Dutch wolf pack https://rewilding.academy/rewilding/wolf-pups-nl/ Tue, 09 Aug 2022 14:37:24 +0000 https://rewilding.academy/?p=5352 The South Veluwe is yet another place in the Netherlands, where wolf pups have not been spotted until...

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]]> The South Veluwe is yet another place in the Netherlands, where wolf pups have not been spotted until recently. This suggests the presence of a fourth wolf pack in the Netherlands. 

Last week the NOS published the news of a third official wolf pack identified in the regions of Southeast Friesland and Southwest Drenthe. In recent months, wildlife cameras in the areas captured a male wolf and a female wolf together several times. 

A wolf pack in the Dutch field close to a forest.

Parents of the wolf pups in the southern Veluwe are not yet identified as there is no formal monitoring in place. But most likely they are offspring of wolves seen in the southeast Veluve region.

Zoologist Dick Klees commented for the NOS that all observations of wolves in the Netherlands go through the Wolves Reporting Centre. The images of wolf pups did not surprise him as the wolf population in the Netherlands finds its habitats. “I did expect there would be pups, because the wolf pair in Drenthe-Friesland has been there for a while. But it doesn’t always happen. We’ve also had wolves on the Veluwe where nothing happened” said Klees for the NOS.

Don’t get close to the wolf pups

With the protected status of wolves, the authorities ask people to stay away from the pups in case of an encounter. For the wolf pups’ safety, it is important that people give the adult wolves a space to find it safe to return to their pups. Abandoned wolf pups may be exposed to potential predators such as foxes.

Moreover, startled wolves may also flee to potentially dangerous areas such as the nearby road. This is also one of the reasons why the Wolves Reporting Centre and Bij12, an organization that supports provinces in implementing nature policy, do not want to share the exact location of the wolf family.

Wolves are a protected species: disturbing, capturing, or killing wolves is prohibited.

The wolf pups identified in the Southeast Friesland and Southwest Drenthe are now about three months old according to NOS. This makes them highly vulnerable as at this age they are completely dependent on their parents securing food. 

Klees said for the article in NOS that “The wolf parents mainly hunt deer, hares and rabbits.” Not until they are one year old do the pups start hunting themselves.

Two wolves in a muddy field next to a grassy patch.

Sheep and mouflons – not the wolves’ favorite target; packs prefer natural prey

Sheep farmers in Drenthe and Mouflon herders in the Hoge Veluwe National park are concerned about the arrival of wolves claiming their flocks are regularly attacked. 

Yet Klees thinks wolf packs do not primarily target sheep and mouflons. “With a pack, it works differently than with wolves that roam alone. Lone wolves can go for easy prey such as sheep. But once a wolf pack settles in an area, the killing of sheep goes away completely and they focus on natural prey” said Klees for the NOS. 

Wandering wolves are not tolerated in the territory of the wolf pack with pups. The wolf pack would try and eradicate any lone wolf. At the same time, wandering wolves avoid the territory of the wolf packs as they are very timid and conscious of the danger of being chased off marked territories.

Photos and videos by Marc Wilbers

Sources: 1) Marc Wilbers 2) NOS

Learn more about wolves and how they change river ecosystems.

Quick wolf pup facts

What is a wolf pack?

Wolf pack is a family group of wolves comprised of the female, the male parent and four to six wolf pups.

What do wolf pups eat?

As wolves are mammals, for the first three weeks after birth, wolf pups feed on milk. In the third week, they start eating meat brought to them by the adult wolves. The pups lick around the adult’s wolf mouth to request feeding. The adult then regurgitates the meat from its stomach.

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]]> Rewilding our Cities: Nature-Based Solutions for our Urban Environment https://rewilding.academy/rewilding/rewilding-our-cities-event/ Tue, 05 Jul 2022 09:42:59 +0000 https://rewilding.academy/?p=5132 Rewilding our cities event with speakers from Ecosulis, Studio NousNous and Gardens by the Bay! We discussed the global urban rewilding developments. Watch the event recording for free!

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]]> In collaboration with the Rewilding Community of Practice, we hosted an online panel discussion event on “Rewilding our cities”. The goal of the event was to inspire people and increase awareness about rewilding opportunities in cities.

Rewilding is the process of restoring natural ecosystems. With an increasing number of rewilding success stories, the global interest in this topic keeps growing. Many rewilding projects focus on natural areas and the reintroduction of missing species to restore food webs and ecosystem processes. But rewilding can take place at different scales and with a growing urban population, rewilding our cities can bring multiple benefits to human wellbeing, biodiversity and climate resilience of our cities.

During the webinar, we explored urban rewilding initiatives and discussed opportunities and challenges linked to rewilding our cities. We let these questions guide our event and discussion:

What does rewilding mean in the urban context? What are the success stories in urban rewilding? What role can urban areas play in the quest of restoring the planet?

Urban Rewilding Panelists

Juat Ying Ng,
Assistant Director, Gardens by the Bay

Juat Ying Ng, Assistant Director of Singapore’s iconic Gardens by the Bay’s sustainability office. She focuses on initiatives for urban rewilding, such as restoring Singapore’s kingfisher wetlands, and local ecosystem restoration. She is a strong proponent of effective climate action and has previously worked in the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment where she was in charge of promoting Singapore’s Green Plan 2030, which outlines a bold national vision for sustainable development.

Cain Blythe,
CEO at Ecosulis

With over 30 years of experience in ecosystem restoration and urban rewilding, Cain Blythe is a chartered environmentalist. He is a co-author of Rewilding: the radical new science of ecological recovery, a book that has received widespread recognition. Cain places a special emphasis on the use of technology as a tool for natural recovery.

Hakim El Amrani,
Founder, Studio NousNous

Hakim is the founder of Studio NousNous, a design and research firm based in the Netherlands specializing in biophilic spatial design. He is an advocate for green healing spaces with a track record of creating highly regarded nature-based design projects in the built environments for clients such as the city of Amsterdam and the Stedelijk Museum.

Why do we need to Rewild our Cities?

Introducing functional ecosystems back into our cities, urban rewilding helps to create more liveable spaces. There are a number of benefits linked to rewilding our cities such as physical and mental well-being, improved climate (self-)regulation, and the creation of more liveable habitats for biodiversity.

Learn more about rewilding our cities in our course on Urban Rewilding re-launching on October 4th 2022.

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