Where are the wilder parts of anthropogenic landscapes? A mapping case study for Denmark

Wilderness protection and restoration has become an important focus for European nature conservation policy. The European Parliament Resolution on wilderness calls for a clear definition of this term, an assessment of what is left of European wildernesses and improved protection strategies, while it also discusses the integration of wilderness protection into the NATURA 2000 network. One key challenge is the provision of accurate maps of wilderness areas to assist efforts aimed at proper protection and integration into landscape planning, notably where they occur as small fragments in intensely used landscapes. In this study, two approaches to GIS-based perceived wilderness mapping were applied to the intensely used Danish landscape to determine where its wildest parts occur. Orthophotos and ground-truthing revealed that areas estimated to have relatively high wildness quality were indeed dominated by relatively isolated natural or semi-natural habitats, e.g. forests, wetlands and dune systems. The spatial distribution of these relatively wild areas was compared to the extents of the existing national parks and the NATURA 2000 system to assess their degree of protection. While national parks and relatively wild areas did not always show high congruence, the NATURA 2000 network overlapped well with wildness areas. As a key finding, GIS-based wilderness mapping can be meaningfully applied to inventorying relatively wild areas in highly anthropogenic landscapes. Hence, GIS-based wilderness mapping should be part of the standard tool kit used in landscape planning to ensure protection of remaining wild areas and to assist the planning of locations for new wildness areas.