Mapping and protecting wild places

Professor Steve Carver of Leeds University talks about the challenge of mapping wild places to protect them and puts what the Trust does into an international setting.

Newly elected John Muir Trust Trustee Steve Carver – Professor of rewilding and wilderness science at Leeds University – gave Trust Members and supporters a wonderful insight into the challenge of mapping wild places at our recent Wild Places Gathering held near Loch Lomond. Here are some highlights taken from his illustrated speech. 

Using up the planet

We are using up the planet. Underpinning this is ‘human appropriation of net primary productivity’ – ie how much of the Earth’s resources are we using to grow food, fell timber etc. 

James Watson and his team have written papers based on the last of the wild. They calculated that in the last 30 years we have lost 10% of the world’s wild areas and that’s really worrying.

The problem with protecting wild places is that it’s intrinsic that we all know what we are talking about. We’ve all experienced wild places, we are able to talk about that down the pub, or over breakfast. We share the enjoyment we’ve got from them, the inspiration, the value that we place on them – but politicians, developers, economists, planners etc don’t understand those kinds of terms necessarily in their work. They understand numbers and lines on maps. 

The defensive line

I try to develop approaches that allow us to put a line on a map and say ‘it’s here!’ That’s where the defensive line is. I do this by splitting it down into both the bio-physical (the natural processes that govern the world) and our perceptions of that – ie natural processes vs natural landscapes. 

A lot of my work has focused on mapping wilderness qualities and characters based on the wilderness continuum. This ranges from urban areas to wilderness and in between. 

We have gradations of wild, depending on the human footprint. By identifying elements of human impact (such as modification of landcover, the ruggedness of the landscape and how remote we are from the nearest point of recognised access) we are able to map wildness quality at very fine resolution. We use techniques which are robust, reliable, repeatable and rigorous that stand up to scrutiny of the planners, the politicians. 

The numbers that we generate and the lines on the maps are defensible.
^ Examples of work Steve’s team has done in Scotland’s two National Parks, and at the European scale.

Developing a Wild Places Index

The John Muir Trust’s Wild Places Index has highlighted 45 UK zones to try to develop the wild places that are important within these areas. It’s a good starting point using the landscape regions, but they are at the mercy of the boundaries drawn – if you change the boundaries, you change the results. The numbers change when you start changing the boundaries. 

^ A more robust approach might be to use hexagon maps. Hexagons because they tessellate and are the closest to a circle, which is the most compact geometric shape.

We need a Wild Places Index that is rigorous, robust, repeatable and reliable – the four Rs of spatial analysis. 

A global framework

Taking it to the international level, three of COP15’s Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework targets are important:

1. Participatory mapping by 2030

2. Restore 30% of the world’s degraded land, sea and water by 2030

3. Protect 30% of the planet’s biodiversity, land, sea and water by 2030. 

The Kunming-Montreal agreement didn’t say where that 30% should be so there’s a role for the Trust in addressing these 30x30 targets.

The 30x30 vision is about rebalancing the priorities of humanity and wild nature. We rely on wild places for Earth’s life support system. Without wild places, we’re doomed.