Knepp Estate Rewilding (2001)

Named instance of the rewilding-project-network-class (LM-Dawn). Knepp Wildland, formerly Knepp Castle Estate (West Sussex, England, ~3500 acres), began rewilding in 2001 when Sir Charles Burrell and Isabella Tree pivoted from loss-making intensive dairy/arable farming to large-scale naturalistic grazing, following Frans Vera's thesis that proxy mega-herbivores (Old English Longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs, fallow deer, roe deer, red deer) can substitute for extinct Pleistocene megafauna and drive low-nutrient, open woodland mosaics that sustain high biodiversity. Initial fencing 2002; first naturalistic-grazing cohort established by 2003. [CANON] ecological outcomes: white stork bred Britain first since 1416 (Knepp 2020); turtle dove, nightingale, purple emperor butterfly populations in national recovery; hedgehog density among UK's highest. [CANON] commercial outputs: "wild range" beef + pork products sold to Waitrose and direct; ~50,000 visitors/year for safaris and education; glamping revenue; educational programme for farmers + policymakers. [EXTRAP] cross-era couplings: Knepp's template directly influenced UK Agriculture Act 2020 + England Countryside Stewardship and ELMS (Environmental Land Management Schemes) "public money for public goods" framing post-Brexit — hostile_inheritance from CAP (EU Common Agricultural Policy) subsidy machine; zombie_dependency on MM-era cadastral/land-registry apparatus (freehold estate tenure is the substrate Knepp operates through); adapted_inheritance from DM conservation-science (naturalistic-grazing thesis = reterritorialized conservation biology). Captures = [EXTRAP] per C4/C8 LM constraints. Knepp's capture_resistance_index is MODERATE (~0.45): private estate owned by one family, meaning capture-by-owner is structurally low but NOT absence of capture risk — commercialisation pressures (safaris, glamping, wild-range premium) create potential co-optation vectors not present in publicly governed reserves. Honest signal per C8. All quantitative LM-coupling values are [EXTRAP]; ecological facts (stork breeding, species counts) are [CANON].