Who We Are
Allta Ecology is a pioneering consultancy for Ireland, founded in 2024 by ecologist Jack Kennedy with belief in the power of nature restoration as a tool for change, and its ability to provide numerous other social and environmental benefits.
We want to make nature restoration accessible not just conservation organisations, but also for all stakeholders, including businesses committed to being more sustainable and give back to the community, landowners (big and small) wanting to restore biodiversity, developers that wish to produce biodiversity-conscious projects, and community groups, schools, charities, and clubs who want to invest in their natural heritage and local habitats.
We embody the ethos that no space is too small and no ambition is too great. Ecology and biodiversity belong to no one group and everyone can enjoy nature in whatever space they have.
Jack Kennedy, BSc(Hons), ACIEEM
Founder, Principal Consultant
Jack’s ecology journey began early in life with a keen interest in wildlife and nature as a whole. He is a Zoology graduate from University College Cork and spent the first 7 years of his career in professional consultancy as an ornithology surveyor, studying the behaviour and distribution of some of Ireland’s rarest birds across the west of Ireland.
Jack is an Associate member of the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM). He is also an avid and acclaimed wildlife photographer, gardener, forager and ceramicist.
Originally from the People’s Republic of Cork, now based in county Galway, Jack has spent the past 2 years working in nature restoration, rewilding and biodiversity enhancement. through his career he has a deep connection to the natural world and shares that with those around him. He has a particular interest in the small things, believing that small actions make all the difference when applied at scale. While industry and businesses have significant roles to play in the changing ecosystems around us, Jack believes that the key to changing the tide on biodiversity loss lies in the small collective actions of individuals, communities, and charities.
Atlantic Puffin (Fratercula arctica) with dinner, Sceilig Mhór.
Restoration or Rewilding?
“Rewilding is a progressive approach to conservation. It’s about letting nature take care of itself, enabling natural processes to shape land and sea, repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes. Through rewilding, wildlife’s natural rhythms create wilder, more biodiverse habitats”
- Rewilding Europe
Rewilding in essence is removal of human influence from a habitat or ecosystem to allow natural processes to resume uninterrupted. It is a highly effective conservation method used mostly on landscape scale to restore wider ecosystems in collaboration with landowners, conservation workers, and communities, to enable nature to do the work.
In Ireland however, most of our habitats are highly altered from their natural state with natural processes such as drainage, grazing, woodlands, nutrient cycles either intensively managed for human use, or altered beyond optimum functionality. The mosaic of landowners across Ireland also provides an additional challenge to rewilding ecosystems, with 100’s of acres or even entire counties worth of collaboration needed to effectively rewild an ecosystem. That is why at Allta, we opt for a Restorative approach.
Habitat restoration embodies the Rewilding ethos, but calls for a more managed approach to conservation. The goal we have is to identify priority and high value habitats and manage the adjacent landscape in collaboration with communities, landowners, charities, and industry experts to improve habitats to a point where they have the capacity and resilience to one day be Rewilded. We focus on fostering biodiversity hotspots and connecting them to others via restored corridors. Like any good team, these ecosystems cannot work in isolation. These networks will one day form the foundation for wider biodiversity enhancement across Ireland.