Parts Unknown: Measuring wildness

Working with Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH)

SNH are the government-funded body charged with looking after all of Scotland's nature and landscapes.  This includes promoting the sustainable use of rural and wild land.  Dr Carver began working with SNH in 1999 when he was asked to help model remoteness in the Cairngorm Mountains with a view to them becoming a national park.

Since 2000, when national parks were established in Scotland, SNH have needed robust and defensible wild land maps of the Cairngorms National Park and the Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park, to fully understand the character of the park and inform decisions around their use and management.  

How it works

The approach developed uses several sources of information including digital maps, satellite images, aerial photography and ground based survey data to produce dynamic maps which illustrate the wildness of any landscape according to various attributes by which wildness can be measured.  These are:

• The perceived naturalness of the land cover 
• The absence of modern human artefacts in the landscape 
• The rugged and otherwise challenging nature of the terrain 
• The remoteness from mechanised forms of access
• The remoteness from populated areas

Several maps are subsequently created which describe the main attributes of wildness.  These are then combined by map overlay to create an overall index of wildness.  This index is based on a sliding scale or continuum that describes the degree of human modification of the landscape through contemporary land use, visible constructions and access roads, together with the physical nature of the terrain itself which determines how easy or difficult it is to cross.

Dr Carver carried out data collection and analysis in 2008 and again in 2010 which succeeded in providing a new level of insight into the nature of both parks.  The maps confirmed the parks' position in the national context and were deployed as communication tools for describing different wild land management zones to stakeholders and the public.  

Dr Carver's work is today being used to protect and preserve wilderness in national parks and wild areas because it enables 'what if?' modelling to show how new developments might impact on the landscape (for example, a new wind farm).  This information is invaluable in informing the planning process and the classification, management and protection of wild spaces , not least because it is a finite resource at risk from the cumulative effects of human developments.

Simon Brookes, Policy and Advice Manager at SNH commented:

"Prior to these projects we were very dependent on an expert-led approach to identifying Scotland's wilder landscapes.  The approach used by Dr Carver and the WRi in the two national parks provides a more transparent and repeatable method. We are now extending this work to map relative wildness for the whole of Scotland.  We intend to use this to inform discussions on what are Scotland's key areas of wild land, and which areas should be safeguarded."

Dr Carver has worked with: Scottish Natural Heritage(SNH), the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park Authority, the Cairngorm National Park Authority, the North Pennines and Nidderdale AONB Partnerships, the John Muir Trust, the European Environment Agency and the US Forest Service/Death Valley National Park. 

For more information please contact Dr Steve Carver or visit the Wildland Research Institute website.

Alternatively, see: Guide to mapping wildness in Scotland: a beginners guide, S. Carver.