Zoderer, BM, Carver, S orcid.org/0000-0002-4202-8234, Tappeiner, U et al. (1 more author) (2020) Ordering 'wilderness': Variations in public representations of wilderness and their spatial distributions. Landscape and Urban Planning, 202. 103875. p. 103875. ISSN 0169-2046
Abstract
Wilderness has recently re-emerged as a key landscape quality in the public debate in Europe, experiencing renewed appreciation in terms of tourism and nature conservation. At the same time, wilderness has turned into a critical matter of conflict, calling for a better understanding of the public’s varied views on wilderness and the spatial localisation of areas of potential conflict. In this paper, we explore the plurality of existing public wilderness representations combining qualitative evidence from 21 semi-structured interviews with quantitative data from a large-scale questionnaire survey (n = 858) conducted in the region of South Tyrol in the Central Alps. This is complemented with a GIS-based approach to quantify and map the geographic coverage of the different representations of wilderness. Our study reveals three distinct public wilderness representations, i.e. ‘Area with no human impact’, ‘Remote and large area’, and ‘Area where nature can self-develop’, differing in terms of selection and weighting of wilderness attributes. The translation of wilderness representations into maps shows clear differences in spatial distribution, location, and extent of areas with high wilderness quality across the three representations. We further demonstrate the added value of our approach by comparing the results with a standardised, expert-based approach on wilderness quality mapping, finding that the extent of areas of high wilderness quality significantly varies depending on whether the mapping is based on experts' or public's representation of wilderness. We therefore conclude that recognising public wilderness representations and their plurality is fundamental for identifying areas of potential conflict and sustainably managing wild landscapes.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) |
Keywords: | Wilderness quality; Mental representation; Mapping; Wilderness perception; Conflict; Wilderness conservation |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Geography (Leeds) > Centre for Spatial Analysis & Policy (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 03 Jul 2020 13:36 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 22:20 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2020.103875 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:162744 |