Rabbits, wildcats, pond turtles and a free-flowing river: one open connectivity screen for trophic and hydrological rewilding in the Greater Côa Valley, Portugal

Rewilding projects usually treat predators, prey and rivers as three separate questions. In the Greater Côa Valley, northern Portugal, they meet in three animals: the European rabbit, keystone prey of the Iberian Peninsula and Endangered in its native range; the European wildcat, which depends on it; and the pond turtle, which holds on where summer pools hold water. We ran one screen for all three on an open, laptop-scale connectivity workflow (10,230 km², ten focal species, circuit theory in pure Python, with penalties for recent fire, 22 field-recorded barriers and two UNESCO World Heritage areas). Rabbit release candidates were limited to scrub-pasture mosaic inside the top third of the wildcat's land corridors: 1,045 km² in ten priority survey blocks, 87% of it on hunting land. The pond turtle screen found 96 pools with water all year, 48 on better-connected rivers, 13 inside the Côa rock-art core and only one within 2 km of a rabbit area. The wildcat is supported, not released, through neutering of domestic cats and mesopredator monitoring. A quarter of the study area lies in Spain, where Natura 2000 sites and natural parks face the Portuguese ones across the border, but the model stops at the border. The Côa is free-flowing because a 1995 civic campaign, "As gravuras não sabem nadar", stopped a dam to save its rock art. We pair the maps with new drawings of the three animals in the valley's Iron Age fine-line style. We propose (i) a rabbit baseline run with hunters, (ii) an August pool survey before any turtle release, (iii) adding both species to the workflow, and (iv) a transfrontier study that extends the model into Spain. Which animals will the next chapter of the Côa include, and who decides?