Research PaperWhere are the wilder parts of anthropogenic landscapes? A mapping case study for Denmark
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
References (66)
- et al.
How can wastelands promote biodiversity in cities? A review
Landscape and Urban Planning
(2014) - et al.
Public Participation GIS: A new method for national park planning
Landscape and Urban Planning
(2011) - et al.
A GIS model for mapping spatial patterns and distribution of wild land in Scotland
Landscape and Urban Planning
(2012) - et al.
Keeping it wild: Mapping wilderness character in the United States
Journal of Environmental Management
(2013) - et al.
Biodiversity in natural versus managed forest in Denmark
Forest Ecology and Management
(1996) - et al.
Mapping perceived wilderness to support protected areas management in the San Juan National Forest, Colorado
Forest Ecology and Management
(2008) - et al.
“Wilderness”: What it means when it becomes a reality—A case study from the southwestern Alps
Landscape and Urban Planning
(2005) - et al.
Wilderness and biodiversity
Journal for Nature Conservation
(2010) - et al.
Spatial conservation prioritization inclusive of wilderness quality: A case study of Australia's biodiversity
Biological Conservation
(2009) - et al.
Wilderness perceptions versus management reality in the Adirondack Park, USA
Landscape and Urban Planning
(2014)
The wilderness continuum and its implications for Australian wilderness preservation policy
Biological Conservation
Landscape management and landscape changes towards more naturalness and wilderness: Effects on scenic qualities – The case of the Muritz National Park in Germany
Journal for Nature Conservation
Quantitative reconstructions of changes in regional openness in north-central Europe reveal new insights into old questions
Quaternary Science Reviews
Mapping wildness for protected area management: A methodological approach and application to the Dolomites UNESCO World Heritage Site (Italy)
Landscape and Urban Planning
New wilderness in the Netherlands: An investigation of visual preferences for nature development landscapes
Landscape and Urban Planning
The wilderness purism construct – Experiences from Norway with a simplified version of the purism scale
Forest Policy and Economics
Microhabitats in lowland beech forests as monitoring tool for nature conservation
Forest Ecology and Management
Indicators of wilderness: Using attributes of the land to access the context of wilderness
USDA Forest Service Proceedings
Mapping the wilderness continuum
Wilderness attribute mapping in the United Kingdom
International Journal of Wilderness
Wildness study in the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park. Final Report
DDO land 2012. Metadata
Danish topographic data, Kort10
The Danish National Height Model, DK-DEM
The state of nature in Denmark
Natura 2000 plan 2011. Natura 2000 areas
Natura 2000 plan 2010–2015 Løgstør Bredning, Vejlerne og Bulbjerg
Personal wilderness relationships: Building on a transactional approach
Environmental Management
Ecosystem service benefits of contrasting conservation strategies in a human-dominated region
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B
Cited by (42)
Identifying urban rewilding opportunity spaces in a metropolis: Chongqing as an example
2024, Ecological IndicatorsModeling multi-scale relationships between wilderness area changes and potential drivers: Evidence from the southeast coastal area of China
2024, Journal for Nature ConservationResponse of habitat quality to urban spatial morphological structure in multi-mountainous city
2023, Ecological IndicatorsWildness and habitat quality drive spatial patterns of urban biodiversity
2022, Landscape and Urban PlanningCitation Excerpt :Yet, it cannot be directly separated from non-wildness, but rather expressed from less to more ‘wild’ along a continuum of anthropogenic impacts (Zoderer et al., 2020; Carver & Fritz, 2016). There have been many recent wildness mapping studies (Müller et al., 2015) almost exclusively referred to non-urban landscapes, often minimally affected by human action (Zoderer et al., 2020; Radford et al., 2019; Carver et al., 2012, 2013). Even though only one study has applied wildness mapping in cities (Müller et al., 2018), wildness can be a cost-effective indicator for management to be used in urban contexts: to enhance biodiversity, screening for priority conservation areas, while improving human well-being in cities (Mansur et al., 2022; Jalkanen et al., 2020; Noss, 2020; Kowarik, 2018; Müller et al., 2018).
How do urban green spaces increase well-being? The role of perceived wildness and nature connectedness
2022, Journal of Environmental PsychologyPotential recreation service efficiency of urban remnant mountain wilderness: A case study of Yunyan District of Guiyang city, China
2022, Ecological IndicatorsCitation Excerpt :The experiential extinction not only attenuates people's positive emotions, attitudes, and behaviors in ecological conservation, but also has negative effects on their own health and well-being (Cao et al., 2019). By 2050, about 70% of the world's population will live in cities, and as the urban population continues to surge, residents in fully artificial urban environments will become increasingly need to experience natural wilderness (Müller et al., 2015). In recent years, scholars have put forward the concept of “urban wilderness” based on summarizing the research of “wilderness” in the natural background (Jorgensen and Tylecote, 2007; Li and Meng, 2016; Wang and Wang, 2017; Kowarik 2018; Cao et al., Wang, 2019).
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.
- 1
This work was conducted while the first author was doing an internship at Aarhus University, Section for Ecoinformatics & Biodiversity, Department of Bioscience.