Graphic landscapes, buildings, industrial halls and traffic arteries: modern-day structures that characterise not just conurbations but increasingly also Central Europe’s rural areas. For wildlife, this demands extreme levels of adaptability. But humans also make changes that actively support wild animals: transformed fragments of civilisation designed to provide habitats for rare species. They include compensation areas along railway lines as well as wind and solar parks that can create valuable surrogate biotopes: modern-day “wildernesses”.