During the first half of the twentieth century a number of individuals in Norway participated in the transfer of animals from both the Arctic to the Antarctic regions and vice versa. These projects may be conceptualized as a form of imperial acclimatization, following in the footsteps of earlier attempts to transplant both plants and animals from their indigenous ranges to new geographic locations for both practical and recreational purposes. Reindeer were introduced to the island of South Georgia before World War I as Norwegian whalers turned a space previously uninhabited by humans into the operational hub of a booming Antarctic whaling industry. The successful transplantation of reindeer was followed by less successful attempts to transfer muskoxen from Greenland to Svalbard and the Scandinavian mainland, penguins from the Antarctic to the coast of Norway, and dreams of transferring fur seals from south to north. We argue that these attempts constituted both practical attempts to “enrich” the fauna of discrete habitats, but also expressions of Norwegian authority over the polar regions at a time when imperial ambitions in both the Arctic and Antarctic had significant traction within Norway. The transplanted animals may thus be conceived as geopolitical instruments – mastery over fauna as being a means of expressing mastery over space.

The global extraction of forest and water resources has led to habitat degradation, biodiversity loss, and declines in ecosystem services. As a consequence, ecological restoration has become a global priority. Restoration efforts to offset this trend, however, are not always effective. One reason is that many restoration projects target single ecosystems and fail to acknowledge functional links between ecosystems. We synthesized current knowledge on links between forest and stream ecosystems, the effect of anthropogenic stressors on these links, and their implications for restoration planning. Many examples show that lateral subsidies, such as invertebrate prey and nutrients, are important in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. Stressors such as commercial forestry, flow regulation, stream channelization, and climate change affect these links and should be considered in restoration planning. Restoration practitioners are encouraged to view adjacent forest and stream ecosystems as one entity.

This chapter addresses where two issues – the problem of not seeing at a certain time and the idea of a static nature over time – converge in two historical searches for the last: the European beaver (Castor fiber) in Sweden at the end of the nineteenth century and the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) of Tasmania in the twentieth. I explore how the presence of an absence (no known animals) became understood over time as an absence of presence (extinction) through narrative. Swedish beavers and Tasmanian thylacines had both become rare and then finally unseen, which led some people to claim their extinction. Others, however, claimed that the animals had survived, that they continued to exist in the wild fringes beyond civilization. Significantly these searches appear on the fringes of the modern developed world: the northern forests of the northern nation of Sweden and the island of Tasmania off the southeastern coast of Australia. Contentious conclusions resulted from the uncertainty of knowledge and management of the unknown. Consensus on the extinction of the beaver was more easily reached than the thylacine, but in both cases, extinction narratives became fixed and paved the way for efforts to reverse the extinctions. These histories reveal how extinction narratives are built on the acceptance of presence of absence as a sign for absence of presence.

The article discusses the political and natural implications of the historical criteria included in Red List designations.