Elsevier

Landscape and Urban Planning

Volume 144, December 2015, Pages 90-102
Landscape and Urban Planning

Research Paper
Where are the wilder parts of anthropogenic landscapes? A mapping case study for Denmark

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2015.08.016Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We tested the applicability of wilderness mapping to intensely used landscapes.

  • State-of-the-art mapping approaches were applied to Denmark at 100-m cell size.

  • Ground-truthing validated the reasonable identification of relatively wild areas.

  • There was high congruence between relatively wild areas and the NATURA 2000 network.

  • Wilderness mapping is useful for landscape planning also in intensely used landscapes.

Abstract

Wilderness protection and restoration has become an important focus for European nature conservation policy. The European Parliament Resolution on wilderness calls for a clear definition of this term, an assessment of what is left of European wildernesses and improved protection strategies, while it also discusses the integration of wilderness protection into the NATURA 2000 network. One key challenge is the provision of accurate maps of wilderness areas to assist efforts aimed at proper protection and integration into landscape planning, notably where they occur as small fragments in intensely used landscapes. In this study, two approaches to GIS-based perceived wilderness mapping were applied to the intensely used Danish landscape to determine where its wildest parts occur. Orthophotos and ground-truthing revealed that areas estimated to have relatively high wildness quality were indeed dominated by relatively isolated natural or semi-natural habitats, e.g. forests, wetlands and dune systems. The spatial distribution of these relatively wild areas was compared to the extents of the existing national parks and the NATURA 2000 system to assess their degree of protection. While national parks and relatively wild areas did not always show high congruence, the NATURA 2000 network overlapped well with wildness areas. As a key finding, GIS-based wilderness mapping can be meaningfully applied to inventorying relatively wild areas in highly anthropogenic landscapes. Hence, GIS-based wilderness mapping should be part of the standard tool kit used in landscape planning to ensure protection of remaining wild areas and to assist the planning of locations for new wildness areas.

Introduction

In this Anthropocene age, humans dominate Earth's landscapes to a greater extent than ever before (Ellis et al., 2013, Hooke and Le Martín-Duque, 2012) by changing natural systems on every possible scale (Sanderson et al., 2004). More than 50% of Earth's terrestrial land is now dominated by anthropogenic ecosystem types (Ellis et al., 2013, Hooke and Le Martín-Duque, 2012) and this percentage is predicted to increase in the coming decades (Ellis et al., 2013). At the same time, there is an increasing realization that wild lands are valuable by sustaining critical ecological processes (Klein et al., 2009) such as, e.g., hydrological control, carbon sequestration, nitrogen fixation and pollination, thereby securing and providing important ecosystem services (Mittermeier et al., 2003). Additionally, there are aesthetic, moral and spiritual values connected to wilderness areas that are important experiences to humans apart from ecological values (Van den Berg & Koole, 2006). Already at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century the first national parks were established in the US, their main purpose being to keep wild areas preserved (Sarkar, 1999), although that might often not have been ‘pristine’ landscapes with native people using such areas for centuries before (Willis, Gillson & Brncic, 2004). One of the most famous attempts to place such wilderness areas under protection is the Wilderness Act of the United States established in 1964 (US Congress, 1964).

Even in Europe, the continent with least wilderness left (McCloskey & Spalding, 1989), an increasing demand for the protection of the remaining wild areas has developed during the last decade. The protection and restoration of wilderness in Europe have become an important policy issue, leading to the passing of a European Parliament Resolution on wilderness in Europe in 2009 (Jones-Walters & Civic, 2010). A major aim of this resolution, besides defining the term wilderness and mapping its extent, is a better protection. It is suggested to integrate wilderness protection into the existing NATURA 2000 network as wilderness areas are considered to be of importance for sustaining biodiversity (European Parliament, 2009). Based on this suggestion, guidelines for integrating wilderness protection into the management of NATURA 2000 sites have recently been published (European Commission, 2013). In these guidelines, wilderness is defined as follows: “A wilderness is an area governed by natural processes. It is composed of native habitats and species, and large enough for the effective ecological functioning of natural processes. It is unmodified or only slightly modified and without intrusive or extractive human activity, settlements, infrastructure or visual disturbance.” (European Commission, 2013, p. 10).

Past studies have shown that wilderness is not easily defined (e.g., Lesslie & Taylor, 1985). The definition given by the European Commission includes parts of two different concepts of wilderness: the anthropocentric concept and the biocentric concept (Lesslie & Taylor, 1985) also referred to as perceived wilderness and ecological wilderness, respectively (Jones-Walters & Civic, 2010). Ecological wilderness is a pristine landscape without human influence, where natural, primary ecosystems are intact and nature or natural processes shape the environment. This is reflected in following statements of the definition by the European Commission: “[…] governed by natural processes […] composed of native habitats and species, […] effective ecological functioning of natural processes […] unmodified […] without human activity”. Today, with human activities having changed the Earth System on every possible scale (Steffen et al., 2004), it is increasingly hard to see where truly pristine landscapes should be left on our planet, especially in Europe. Nevertheless, ecosystems might be less and more severely disturbed, in many cases allowing restoration attempts that might successfully restore their functioning. Socioeconomic changes are currently providing increased possibilities for allowing a greater proportion of land areas in Europe to become ecologically self-willed lands (Navarro & Pereira, 2012), thereby restoring ecological wildernesses. In contrast, perceived wilderness is basically a psychological concept. A landscape can be perceived as wilderness because of certain key features, e.g., overwhelming scenery, the difficulty to access or the lack of signs of human civilisation (Aplet, Thomson, & Wilbert, 2000). Each person will evaluate these features in an individual way, depending on the cultural background, way of living, experiences and preferences leading to an individual wilderness perception (Flanagan & Anderson, 2008). In the definition by the European Commission, this is shown by the attributes: “without […] human activity, settlements, infrastructure or visual disturbance”. Ecological wildernesses will typically be perceived wildernesses, but also landscapes that are strongly shaped by – usually past – human activities may often also be appreciated as wilderness. There have been various studies on wilderness perception in different countries (e.g., Flanagan and Anderson, 2008, Larkin and Beier, 2014, Van den Berg and Koole, 2006, Vistad and Vorkinn, 2012). All of these studies (with the work of Van den Berg and Koole, 2006 being an exception) group people according to Stankey's purism scale (Stankey, 1973), ranging from non-purist to strong purist, reflecting how stringent requirements people have in order to perceive a landscape as wild. Vistad and Vorkinn (2012) present a simplified and standardized version of this purism scale in their work which they consider easier applicable for management purposes. With such knowledge one might be able to inform planning decisions according to the needs of the different groups (Larkin & Beier, 2014).

Reflecting the continuousness of the wilderness concepts, approaches to map wilderness normally do not seek to divide landscapes into ‘wild’ and ‘not wild’, but rather use concepts such as the wilderness quality continuum (Carver & Fritz, 1998). Under this approach the absolute wilderness as untouched and pristine land is at one extreme of a gradient in different wilderness states, with a totally human-controlled city centre or indoor environment (e.g., shopping mall) at the other extreme (Lesslie & Taylor, 1985). To assist wilderness conservation, GIS-based wilderness mapping relying on such continuum approaches has been implemented during the last 30 years on different spatial levels, ranging from world-wide assessments (McCloskey and Spalding, 1989, Sanderson et al., 2002), over continental (Aplet et al., 2000, Fisher et al., 2010) and national scales (Carver et al., 2002, Ólafsdóttir and Runnström, 2011) to local-scale wilderness mapping for national parks (Carver et al., 2012, Carver et al., 2013).

Most wilderness mapping studies have included or focused on landscapes with relatively little human influence (Carver et al., 2012, Carver et al., 2013, Lesslie and Taylor, 1985, Ólafsdóttir and Runnström, 2011). However, wilderness mapping may also be useful for landscape planning in the heavily used anthropogenic landscapes that are increasingly common in this Anthropocene epoch (Ellis et al., 2013). Notably, most people live in such landscapes and access to relatively self-willed, wild areas may contribute importantly to their quality of life. Further, even in such landscapes relatively wild areas may play an important role for biodiversity (Bonthoux, Brun, Di Pietro, Greulich, & Bouché-Pillon, 2014) and ecosystem services (Eigenbrod et al., 2009).

Denmark exemplifies this situation, with a population density of 131.1 inhabitants/km2 (Statistics Denmark, 2014a) and 66% of the land area being used for agriculture (Statistics Denmark, 2014b), meaning that Denmark uses more space for agriculture relative to its size than any other European country. Only 14.1% of the country's area is covered by forest (Johannsen, Nord-Larsen, Riis-Nielsen, Suadicani, & Jørgensen, 2013), most of which are intensively managed, and only 10% by semi-natural open land areas such as meadows, dunes, and heaths (Danish Ministry of the Environment, 2005). To our knowledge no mapping of wilderness areas has ever been performed for Denmark. Although technically the concept of wilderness mapping can be applied to any given area and will lead to relative results, it is currently unknown whether or not such mapping approaches will lead to meaningful results in a landscape where human impacts are pervasive as it is the case in Denmark. It is also an interesting question what kind of areas would be scored as most wild.

The overall aim of this study is to assess to what extent wilderness mapping methods can be meaningfully used to inform landscape planning in the intensely used landscapes that have become increasingly common in the Anthropocene. We therefore use two state-of-the-art wilderness mapping approaches (Carver et al., 2012, Orsi et al., 2013) to map continuous relative perceived wildness across Denmark as well as to provide a classification into three distinct relative wildness classes. To this end, we addressed the following specific study questions: (1) Where in Denmark are areas with high relative wildness located? (2) How much of the Danish landscape is mapped as relatively wild? (3) Are areas of high relative wildness congruent with protected areas, notably NATURA 2000 areas and the Danish national parks? (4) Do wilderness mapping approaches produce meaningful results, i.e., identifying areas that also appear relatively wild in the real world? We use ground-truthing and orthophotos to assess the ecosystem types and other characteristics of areas with different wildness quality scores.

Section snippets

Materials and methods

The standard method for wilderness quality mapping is based on multi-criteria evaluation techniques to compare a certain number of criteria that will influence the wilderness quality of a given area. This approach was used to derive a relative wildness quality map for Denmark on a 100 m resolution, generally following the methods and recommendations given in a recent study by Carver et al. (2012). As indicators of perceived wilderness the following four attributes were chosen: (1) human

Where in Denmark are areas with high relative wildness?

The relative perceived wilderness mapping resulted in similar geographic patterns of relative wilderness scores at the national level for all three weighting schemes (Fig. 1A–C). The main part of the highest wilderness scores was assigned to the western coastline of Jutland, various smaller islands (e.g., Anholt, Læsø and Rømø), and fragmented forest as well as the lake areas in central Jutland. The two biggest islands Funen and Zealand seem to have far fewer high wildness areas, with the ones

Where in Denmark are the areas with high relative wildness?

Areas with high wildness scores are especially concentrated along the western coastline of Denmark with many areas of high wildness scores also elsewhere in western, central and northern Jutland. Therefore it is obvious that relatively wild areas in Denmark are concentrated in the parts dominated by poor sandy soils, which historically have been less attractive for agriculture and therefore less densely populated (Nielsen and Odgaard, 2010, Odgaard and Rasmussen, 2000). The particular

Conclusions

The present study shows that GIS-based perceived wilderness mapping can be meaningfully applied to intensely used, densely inhabited landscapes and thus could be a valuable landscape planning tool to assist wilderness protection in such regions all over the world. Importantly, the wilderness mapping approach is capable of pinpointing where relatively wild areas occur even within a countryside that consists of heavily used landscapes. Wilderness mapping can thereby be used by landscape planners

Acknowledgements

Anke Müller thanks the Section for Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity at the Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University for hosting and supporting her while this work was done. She also acknowledges the ERASMUS Programme and the German National Academic Foundation for funding her internship.

This study was supported by the Aarhus University and Aarhus University Research Foundation under the AU IDEAS programme (via Centre for Informatics Research on Complexity in Ecology, CIRCE). We also consider

Jens-Christian Svenning is a professor in geospatial ecology at the Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University. He is a broadly based ecologist and biogeographer with a strong interest in human-nature relations and the big Anthropocene challenges for biodiversity and wilderness conservation. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in international scientific journals, covering topics such as species distributions, diversity patterns, biological community assembly, climate change

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    Jens-Christian Svenning is a professor in geospatial ecology at the Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University. He is a broadly based ecologist and biogeographer with a strong interest in human-nature relations and the big Anthropocene challenges for biodiversity and wilderness conservation. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in international scientific journals, covering topics such as species distributions, diversity patterns, biological community assembly, climate change effects and human impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems, historical legacies, and megafauna biogeography and ecology.

    Peder Klith Bøcher received his M.Sc. in Biology in 1996, and his Ph.D. in remote sensing in 2004 from Aarhus University, Denmark. Since 2010 he is GIS-Coordinator with the group for Ecoinformatics & Biodiversity in the Department of Bioscience at Aarhus University. Before this he was researcher in the Department of Agroecology since 1997. His major fields of study are remote sensing, GI-science, Geomorphometry, LiDAR, all within the field of ecologic analysis and modelling on all scales from local to global.

    Anke Müller is a student of landscape architecture and landscape planning at Technical University Munich and a scholar of the German National Academic Foundation. She is focusing on landscape planning and landscape ecology She is very interested in exploring new ways of nature conservation and landscapes planning that enhance the ecological intactness as well as the human experiences of our environment.

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    This work was conducted while the first author was doing an internship at Aarhus University, Section for Ecoinformatics & Biodiversity, Department of Bioscience.

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