Need for a cross-sector approach in protected area management

The need for various stakeholders to harmonize their policies and practices has emerged as a dominant paradigm for 21st century natural resource management. Cross-sector coordination is promising because it can enhance policy consistency, enable the realization of synergies and resolve conflicts among sectors regarding resource management. The extent to which ministries and their main stakeholders make efforts to achieve integrated policies for nature conservation requires further research. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore the consultation reports of ministries from relevant fields (i.e., environmental protection, agriculture, spatial planning, and security) regarding the management plans for Romania's protected areas. We analysed and visualized 152 consultation reports (2013-2016) covering 15% of Romania's protected areas using self-organizing maps (SOMs), an unsupervised machine-learning method. Our results showed that considerable attention was paid to formal issues in these reports. The cross-sector issues that emerged as the most important were those related to forest landowner consultation, and the harmonization of agricultural and forestry practices, as well as spatial plans for conservation. The resulting SOMs could be used as a tool to strengthen protected area management in the future because they can (i) guide managers of protected areas to develop plans that ensure that resources will be used in the best way according to the visions of multiple sectors and (ii) help the relevant ministries to improve future consultation reports.