From Shakespeare’s plays to William Wordsworth’s poetry to J.R.R Tolkien’s fantasy realms, Britain’s lush green forests are described as a paradise of trees. Thousands of species have called these oak, hazel, beech and pine woodlands home for millennia. But as human-caused emissions warm up the planet, many of Britain’s iconic species are at risk: a 2023 State of Nature report finds that one in six of the 10,000 species assessed are at risk of being lost from the U.K. due to the climate crisis. As climate change forces species to shift their ranges and find new refuges, others may take their place so that key ecosystem services, such as pollination, soil nutrient cycling and carbon storage, can keep going. However, in islands like Great Britain, where most species can’t naturally disperse due to the sea barrier, the loss of vital species may mean ecosystems can no longer function. This begs the question: Could some humans help disperse species? That’s a thought conservation ecologist James Bullock, at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, and his colleague Charlie Gardner pondered over. In a recent perspective published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, the duo suggest that assisted colonization — or introducing species that can better adapt to a future climate — could benefit some geographies to adapt to rapid climate change. They use the hypothetical future forest ecosystems of Great Britain to argue that proactive approaches, such as mass-scale assisted colonization, could be better for conservation in a warming climate than reactive…This article was originally published on Mongabay