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Abstract Wilderness is vitally important: ecologically, economically, socially and culturally, yet it continues to decline globally. Despite high human modification and fragmentation in European landscapes, studies assessing wilderness in Europe suggest the presence of substantial areas of wilderness in mountainous areas. Following a European resolution, the importance of remaining wilderness areas has recently been recognised and efforts towards mapping and protecting remaining wildernesses have increased. The central Alps lie within Switzerland and have been identified in multiple studies as a potential wilderness hotspot in Europe. In this study we develop robust, objective indicators to quantify wilderness and apply them to Switzerland. The indicators account for varying perceptions of wilderness and were evaluated by experts. Assessing international expert opinion to define indicator weightings has not been carried out in similar studies in the past, but serves as a transparent, objective and reproducible approach. The indicators identified high quality wilderness areas, mostly at higher elevations, and demonstrate a suitable method for assessing remaining wilderness areas in landscapes subjected to large modifications by human activities. The spatial distribution of wilderness in the case study region Switzerland suggest that it may play an important role in wilderness conservation in Europe. Our study provides essential baseline information for wilderness monitoring, planning and protection, upon which future studies can build. Above this it provides robust, objective and adaptable indicators for wilderness quantification, which can be implemented in other countries and across various spatial scales. The method can be adapted for other countries – through the use of local expert opinions to weight indicators, and regions – with the inclusion of further datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key goal in conservation science is to generate information that helps to improve the effectiveness of management, and thus benefit threatened and declining species. I have worked on this issue at the interface of science and management, in both the non-profit and academic sectors. I present examples of some of this research, focussing on research into the causes of, and remedial management for, northern faunal declines. In particular, I present the values of research at large, realistic scales, of considering interactions between threats, and of pairing large-scale work with focal studies on the responses of individual animals to threats and their management. I reflect on the common gap between conservation science and management, and provide thoughts about how this might be bridged. Throughout the article, I try to infuse some of the personal and human elements that are the backstory to any conservation work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the connection between US designated wilderness areas and wildlife with the goal of establishing a research agenda for better understanding this complex relationship. Our research agenda has two components. The first, "wildlife for wilderness," considers the impact of wildlife on wilderness character. Whereas studies show that wildlife is important in both the perception and actual enhancement of wilderness character, the context and particulars of this relationship have not been evaluated. For instance, is knowing that a rare, native species is present in a wilderness area enough to increase perceptions of naturalness (an important wilderness quality)? Or does the public need to observe the species or its sign (e.g., tracks) for this benefit? The second part of our research agenda, "wilderness for wildlife," considers the types of research needed to understand the impact of wilderness areas on wildlife and biodiversity conservation. Several studies show the effect of one area being designated wilderness on one wildlife species. Yet, there has been no research that examines how the networks of wilderness areas in the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS) are used by a species or a community of species. Furthermore, we found no studies that focused on how the NWPS affects ecological or trophic interactions among species. We hope that by providing a research agenda, we can spur multiple lines of research on the topic of wildlife and wilderness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many people today, the idea of wilderness conjures up meanings and images referring to wild, remote, and untrammeled natural areas, which need protection from human presence and utilization. Institutionally, the first Wilderness Act was prescribed in the United States over 50 years ago and the wilderness conservation originates from the establishment of the first national parks in North America in the nineteenth century. First conservation and wilderness areas and related legal acts provided a model on how to organize and manage conservation areas globally. However, this created ‘fortress’ model of global conservation thinking, separating wilderness, and nature from culture and people, has recently been increasingly challenged by views calling for more people-centered approaches in natural resource management. In addition, the tourism industry has become an increasingly important user and socioeconomic element of change in wilderness areas, which has created new kinds of utilization needs for the remaining wild environments. Thus, there are different ways to understand what wilderness is and for and from whom we are protecting those areas. This paper aims to overview some of the key perspectives on how wilderness environment are contextualized, used, and contested: as units of strict conservation; resources for livelihoods and raw materials, and/or tourist products. The purpose is to point out that while we have different and often conflicting understandings of what wilderness is and what it is for, there are also potentially symbiotic relations between different views which could help us to protect the remaining wilderness areas. This is the case especially in the Global South, where the sociopolitical pressures of economic utilization of the remaining wilderness environments are currently the sharpest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wilderness debate that has raged in American environmentalism since the 1990s has led to the valuation of less spectacular forms of nature than wilderness. This increasing interest in ordinary nature brings American environmental thought to an environmental ground more familiar to French ecologists. Although the wilderness idea that has focused on untrammeled places was difficult to integrate into the French philosophical landscape, reaching common ground could foster exchanges between American environmental ethics and French political ecology. More precisely, the renewal of naturalism that emerged from the wilderness debate could inform French political ecology, which sometimes tends to reduce environmental problems to social issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The nomination of the Dutch and German parts of the Wadden Sea as a World Heritage Site within the framework of the World Heritage Convention (WHC) represents high-level recognition of the global importance of this area for millions of migratory birds. It was not the first accolade for the unique wilderness area, but arguably the most prestigious. In its nomination, the World Heritage Convention requests the two countries to strengthen cooperation within the African–Eurasian Flyways, a system of global connectedness by migrant waterbirds in which the Wadden Sea plays a vital role. Here we review the origin and (lack of) implementation of the international conservation instruments available to protect values that are easily undervalued and forgotten, instruments that involve cooperation along the flyway axes. We describe how scientific information sometimes helps governments to implement their obligations, but also how, in spite of indisputable scientific data, governments take decisions contrary to their obligations under international conservation instruments. In some cases such decisions are reversed after scientists have shown measurable declines in the global populations of the migratory waterbirds and established the causality of such declines. At a global level, a few more regional flyway conservation instruments may be needed, but for most parts of the world the instrumentation to secure the well-being of the flyways are in place. It boils down to the determination by governments, informed by good science and under close scrutiny by NGOs, to put them into concrete action. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Since the 1960s, the lower Omo Valley of southwestern Ethiopia has been imagined by conservationists as a 'wilderness', in need of urgent protection from the damaging impact of human activity. For state officials it has been an unproductive wasteland, inhabited by violence prone 'nomads', in need of the political control and civilizing influence of the state. For local people it is home, a place from which they derive not only their livelihoods but also their sense of individual and group identity. Both the conservationists' and the state's ways of imagining the lower Omo are fundamentally pictorial, implying the disengaged standpoint of an external viewer. For local people, it is a 'lived' environment, which they perceive and experience in functional rather than formal terms. Since the setting up of the Omo and Mago National Parks in the 1960s and 1970s, conservation, linked to state coercion, has helped to advance the state's project of control and revenue extraction in its southwestern periphery. New opportunities for the state to advance its political objectives in the lower Omo are now emerging, in the shape of hydro-electric dams and commercial plantations, which are not, however, compatible with the conservationists' goal of wilderness protection. It is suggested that the three ways of imagining the lower Omo identified in the article can be understood as the legitimating ideologies of three competing place-making projects, of unequal power, carried on at three different spatial levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]