Rewilding the Cajun Prairie: Efforts in Land Rehabilitation Ensure a Sustainable Future in Southwestern Louisiana and Beyond

Before European settlement, the prairie ecosystem (Cajun Prairie) of southwestern Louisiana covered an estimated area of more than one million hectares. The landscape of this region, Acadiana, was converted into farmland, oil infrastructure, and urbanscape. Estimated areas are destroyed (99.9%); the remaining 1,500 hectares (0.1%) persist in degraded states. We elaborate upon knock-on negative regional impacts. Restoring the ecological integrity of prairies with native plants is proposed in this work, as a viable approach to sustainable development and a research agenda, which is urgently needed to ensure a sustainable future. Our evaluation study considered a selection of case studies to present achievements and challenges at rewilding in this region at various times and scales. Our report includes 1,349.3 hectares of prairie under restoration. The data were triangulated with qualitative data derived from a systematic literature review and quantitative data from estimates of hectares that were reclaimed into prairie during the last forty years. This assessment enabled us to quantify the values of these efforts for Acadiana. Implications for adoptions and/or adaptations to rewilding in other regions of the world are presented in a distinctive holistic model, which appears in the conclusion section of this manuscript. We envision multiple benefits in rewilding land on a larger scale to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal# 15 (life on land). Using methods resembling those of the American Prairie project, we propose a Cajun Prairie project at the southern end of the massive prairie ecosystem of the central United States, a region that has lost its ‘relative ecological integrity.’