Improving decision-making on wild land conservation in Europe through analysis of human perceptions of wild spaces and species

The conservation and restoration of wild spaces and species has become popular as a cost-effective, nature-based solution, to address biodiversity loss, landscape fragmentation and flood risk. Effective conservation requires a comprehensive evidence base, and there is a clear need for integrated methods to map remaining wilderness areas in support of decision-making on their protection for future generations. This PhD focuses spatially on wild spaces and species within upland areas in France and Scotland. It explores participatory, place-based methods, for capturing human perceptions of wild spaces that could be used to improve the quality of the maps that we make of wildness. It analyses public perceptions towards wild spaces and species in situ at the local level, and examines how they relate to current wildness mapping. It explores the impact of immersion in wild spaces and exposure to historical landscape conditions on attitudes to possible landscape futures and species reintroductions. As an answer to the challenges of better capturing local ecological knowledge, and the subjective nature of our experience of wild spaces, it tests novel methods for including ecoacoustics in the mapping of wildness, which capture more than just the visual attributes of wild spaces. Significant correlations were found between existing maps of wildness, human perceptions of wildness, and ecoacoustic indices captured along the same transect. The results of the different methodological approaches showed a high level of agreement and together reveal details of key attributes of wildness excluded under current methods. An important next step is to develop these methods, improve how the results can be integrated, and explore how additional knowledge types and data could be included. Taken together, the results suggest that future wildness mapping could benefit from the potential of the methods tested here to support more effective conservation of wild spaces and wild species within Europe.