Paper short abstract:

A key challenge for the representation and protection of wild spaces and species is the diverse range of meanings attached to the idea of the 'wild'. This research explored the relationship between established spatial representations of wildness and subjective human knowledges captured in situ.

Paper long abstract:

Participatory walks, including in situ questionnaires were carried out at points along transects traversing urban-wilderness gradients at study sites in the Scottish Highlands and French Pyrenees. A broad range of stakeholders (N = 71) were taken on these 'transect walks' and at pre-specified locations were asked a series of simple landscape assessment questions to quantify their perceptions of the immediate surrounding landscape in terms of biodiversity, naturalness, connectivity, wildness, landscape management and emotional experience. Participants were invited to make comments in order to explain their scores. After watching a short film on historical landscape change in the relevant study site an additional questionnaire collected data on attitudes to wild spaces and wild species reintroductions before and after the walk. In situ subjective human perception scores were directly compared with the existing GIS based landscape scale wildness maps. In situ landscape assessment scores and existing spatial representations of wildness were significantly correlated. Participant attitudes to the conservation of wild spaces in mountain areas also changed significantly after the walk. This integrated participatory mapping technique is designed to improve the quality of wildness mapping and support more inclusive and sustainable approaches to the conservation of wild spaces and species. Involving people in this kind of mapping accesses local knowledge, which cannot be 'seen' from satellites, into the creation of conservation tools such as wildness maps may be one way of resolving the conflict that we currently see around the wild land debate in Scotland and beyond.