In the heart of the Central Apennines rewilding landscape, the residents of Pettorano sul Gizio are benefitting from lives that are increasingly entwined with local nature.

Over 100 participants from Italy and beyond came together to discuss rewilding-related topics at a three-day seminar in the Central Apennines last week. The event helped the local rewilding team raise awareness of rewilding and its positive impacts, and to establish and strengthen relationships with a wide range of stakeholders.

Italian and Greek partners in the LIFE Bear-Smart Corridors initiative recently visited Canada to learn about Bear Smart Communities in British Columbia. The insights acquired and collaborative ethos developed will enhance rewilding efforts.

Four Apennine chamois were released into the Sirente Velino Regional Park in mid-May. This will enhance the existing free-roaming population and boost efforts to secure a long-term future for this iconic species.

Showcasing rewilding efforts in the Central Apennines, the new website will connect people with wild nature and help realise the area’s rewilding vision.

The white-clawed crayfish, which is a keystone species in freshwater ecosystems, is in decline across much of Europe. A positive feasibility study carried out on streams in the Central Apennines rewilding area means a restocking programme can now be carried out, thereby enhancing the ecological condition of these waterways.

The Central Apennines rewilding area in Italy will see Rewilding Europe and Rewilding Apennines work together in a new set up to develop this area as a prime example of European rewilding. One of the first steps is a cooperation with local NGO Salviamo l’Orso to help conserve and boost the critically endangered local population of Marsican brown bears.

For me, being on a photo mission has usually meant traveling and working far away from home, in a more or less exotic place. It therefore was a novel feeling to be “on assignment” for Rewilding Europe in the Central Apennines of Italy, which is really literally speaking my own backyard.

Since a couple of weeks back, three young Italians have a completely new kind of job. In the beautiful Central Apennines, they have become advocates. However, not of the ordinary kind, but rather a more special one: they have become bear advocates!

The small municipalities of Gioia dei Marsi and Lecce nei Marsi in the Central Apennines have decided to bet on nature and to find new ways to earn money from the wilderness on their own “door step”. Creating new opportunities for local businesses and at the same time ensuring an even better protection of those areas. Land abandonment and depopulation are problems that hundreds of regional and EU initiatives so far have failed to solve, in spite of uncountable amounts in subsidies. But now, thanks to the beginning return of wild nature, these problems could instead be made into opportunity. Gioia dei Marsi and Lecce nei Marsi give a good example how the problems are turned into opportunities.