Mapping Wildland

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Mapping Wildland

• Dr Steve Carver
• University of Leeds

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Outline

• Why?
• Methods and previous work
• Examples
• New results for Wales
• Discussion

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Why map wildland?

• One mans wilderness is anothers roadside
  picnic ground
• (Nash, 1982)
• Its about time that environmentalists supported
  their arguments... about landscape aesthetics
  with numbers
• (Leopold, 1969)

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Recent threats

• Renewable energy developments
• Wind farms and HEP
• E.g. Cefn Croes and TAN8

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Methods

• Wilderness Continuum Concept
• Remoteness from population and access
• Naturalness of vegetation and lack of human
  artefacts (Lesslie and Maslen, 1995)
• GIS methods
• Multi-criteria evaluation (Carver Fritz, 1998)
• Fuzzy modelling (Fritz et al., 2000)
• Public participation GIS (Carver et al., 2002)
• Historic trends (Carver and Wrightham, 2004)
• Perception surveys (Carver et al., 2005)

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Remoteness from population
Remoteness from access
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Apparent naturalness
Biophysical naturalness
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Wildland continuum
Wildland class
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Top 20 wildest
Top 10 wildest
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Discussion

• Relevant mapping issues
• User choices
• Criteria, thresholds and weights
• Fuzzy concepts
• Spatial variability
• Scale
• Problematic but necessary
• Protection requires identification
• Mapping in support of wildland designation
• Evaluate impacts from developments
• Support the planning process