Would These Three Actions Allow the Ecoregions to Regrow?

Question

This scenario begins with multitudes of vanishings from around the world, at the same time. All of the domesticated animals (dog, goat, pig, sheep, European cattle, zebu, cat, chicken, Guinea pig, donkey, duck, water buffalo, dromedary, horse, silkmoth, pigeon, goose, swan goose, yak, Bactrian camel, llama, alpaca, guineafowl, ferret, Muscovy duck, Barbary dove, Bali cattle, Gayal, turkey, goldfish, koi, rabbit, canary, Society finch, fancy mouse, fancy rat, hedgehog, silver fox, mink and striped skunk) physically disappeared into thin air, instantly turning 40 million square kilometers of farm land empty and fallowed.

At the same time, all of the world's coal supply--both untapped and reserved--have disappeared, as well, without an atom of soot left standing.

Also at the same time, captive and invasive populations of organisms have been teleported back to their native ecoregions. By captive, I mean non-domesticated organisms in every pet store, ranch, farm, house, zoo, aquarium, animal sanctuary, garden, safari park and game reserve.

It had been a long and painful investigation, but we have eventually found the culprit--our moon, 457 million years in the future, at which point it has become a sphere of alloy and artificial intelligence orbiting a dead Earth. The AI had apparently traveled into all aspects of the past (from the Ediacaran period to the current Anthropocene epoch), scanned all aspects of each of Earth's ecoregions (all of its plants, animals, fungi, microbes and soil), copied and then printed onto their own Earthlike planets in a galaxy that the AI had apparently built, but not before committing those three actions described above first.

Now let's list the basic math of Earth's ecoregions. 867 are terrestrial, 232 marine and 426 freshwater. That totals up to 1,525, 232 of which have been prioritized for conservation.

Would these three actions be enough for all of the ecoregions, including the endangered ones, to enlarge, expand and repopulate the world? If yes, then how quickly would they reach large enough areas to ensure genetic diversity amongst their residents?

Answer 1

Many of the freed organisms will be eaten by humans

Here are the three actions in the OP.

1. Domestic animals vanish.
2. Coal vanishes.
3. Captive animals teleport back to their ancestral lands.

A big problem is the humans. The AI forgot to kill the humans. We are many and we eat a lot. In areas where disappearance of animals disrupts the food supply, starving humans will fan out into the countryside and eat whatever they can catch. This includes all pastoralists who rely on their animals for food. It also includes persons in regions that will be less impacted by the disappearance of coal because these regions rely on draft animals for agriculture. In areas where crops cannot be planted because the draft animals are gone, people will go hungry but they will not die right away.

Cities powered by coal produced electricity will go dark and this will be a big problem in developed areas. It will be chaos. Huge masses of people will flee the riots and cannibals in the city and disperse through the countryside, eating whatever they can catch.

Animals that used to live in zoos will be easy to catch because those zoo animals were used to being fed by humans and they will be hungry too. They will come to people looking for their zookeepers and hoping for feeding time. They will learn it actually is feeding time but not for them.

Forests are also going to be a casualty of the coal disappearance because surviving people will chop them down for fuel. This will take a while, though.

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There will be areas where the released animals do well because these areas are far from human populations and not accessible to starving refugees. Probably endangered animals native to those areas are still there, doing relatively well, because those areas are far from human populations. Consider, though, the area in Siberia where tigers live. There are about 500. There are 650 in captivity. What will happen to tigers when the 650 additional zoo tigers appear in tiger country?

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The premise here is that endangered animals would not be endangered if humans did not have domestic animals and did not burn coal. Some animals have been hunted to near extinction (e.g. whales) but endangered animals are mostly endangered because their habitats have gone away. The AIs action does nothing to restore habitat, but does a lot to pressure animals in what remaining habitats there are.