A four-day digital workshop held last December in the Southern Carpathians rewilding area saw participants brainstorm new ways to mitigate human-bison conflict.

The two-year programme will encourage more young Romanians to become involved in wild nature and forms part of a vision to use reintroduced bison as an engine for driving local development.

The exhibition, which will continue until 2021, depicts the ongoing bison reintroduction in the Southern Carpathians by Rewilding Europe and WWF Romania, with a special focus on reaching out to the younger generation.

In the Southern Carpathians, Rewilding Europe’s bison rangers are playing a key role in the success of our reintroduction project.

Multi-day collaborative workshop in the Southern Carpathians sees construction of beautifully designed building for wildlife viewing and related events.

Last Friday, the LIFE project “Urgent actions for the recovery of European Bison populations in Romania” (LIFE Bison) held its opening ceremony at the “Grigore Antipa” Natural History Museum in Bucharest, Romania. The project works to build a viable population of the European bison in the Tarçu Mountains Natura 2000 site in the Southern Carpathians. The event also marked the opening of the exhibition “The largest land mammal in Europe returns to the Southern Carpathian wilderness”, hosted by the Museum and open to public until end of November.

Over the last four months, I have been doing my internship in the Southern Carpathians rewilding area in Romania. This internship was part of my Master study of Biology at the Wageningen University in The Netherlands. One of my professors connected me with Rewilding Europe where he suggested to me to check out their rewilding project in the Southern Carpathians. After being in touch with the Romanian rewilding team, it became clear that they could really use an intern student this summer, so I went for it!

The Bison Visitor Centre in Armeniș, Țarcu Mountains, Romania, is now presenting scientific data about the bison in a playful and immersive way. It has the biggest holographic projection in Europe with two more installations that were built at the crossroads between art and technology. The data feed, animating the installations, is being continuously collected from the field by trainees from Romania and abroad who study different relevant subjects related to natural sciences. They live and work in the nearby village of Feneș, at the Research Station which was inaugurated this August.

This Saturday, after 3000 km of travelling, ten more European bison originating from Belgian and German zoos and wildlife centres arrived at the Țarcu Mountains in the southern part of Romania. This group joined the herds Rewilding Europe and WWF Romania released here in 2014 and 2015, making one more step towards creating a viable wild bison population to roam freely in this area after 200 years of absence.

Last week, Rewilding Europe and WWF Romania took the first steps towards establishing a bison breeding centre in Romanian Hunedoara Zoo. In the framework of the LIFE Bison project, translocation of two bison marked the start of a new important stage in bringing back this iconic species. Newborn calves will be released from the breeding centre into the wild across the Carpathian Mountains.