Assessing Interconnections Between Wilderness and Adjacent Lands: The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah

Wilderness managers have traditionally managed wilderness lands based on the ecological and social content of wilderness areas. The authors propose a framework to systematically account for the biophysical, socioeconomic, and wildness characteristics of the broader landscape context. The method was applied to the proposed wilderness lands of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. The results illustrate patterns of interdependencies across the landscape. Spatial data demonstrate links between the integrity of proposed wilderness lands and the management of adjacent land units, and links between the economic health of local communities and the management of proposed wilderness and adjacent federal lands

Wildland-urban interface maps vary with purpose and context

Maps of the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) are both pragmatic policy tools and powerful visual images with broad appeal. While the growing number of WUI maps serve the same general purpose, this paper demonstrates that WUI maps based on the same data can differ in ways related to their purpose, and discusses the use of ancillary data in modifying census data. A comparison of two methods suggests GIS methods used for mapping the WUI be tailored to specific questions. Dasymetric mapping to improve census data precision is useful but dependent on data quality, and land ownership datasets suffer problems that argue for caution in their use. No single mapping approach is “best,” and analysts must be clear about the problem addressed, the methods used, and data quality. These considerations should apply to any analysis, but are especially important to analyses of the WUI upon which public-sector decisions will be made

Guiding concepts for park and wilderness stewardship in an era of global environmental change

The major challenge to stewardship of protected areas is to decide where, when, and how to intervene in physical and biological processes, to conserve what we value in these places. To make such decisions, planners and managers must articulate more clearly the purposes of parks, what is valued, and what needs to be sustained. A key aim for conservation today is the maintenance and restoration of biodiversity, but a broader range of values are also likely to be considered important, including ecological integrity, resilience, historical fidelity (ie the ecosystem appears and functions much as it did in the past), and autonomy of nature. Until recently, the concept of "naturalness" was the guiding principle when making conservation-related decisions in park and wilderness ecosystems. However, this concept is multifaceted and often means different things to different people, including notions of historical fidelity and autonomy from human influence. Achieving the goal of nature conservation intended for such areas requires a clear articulation of management objectives, which must be geared to the realities of the rapid environmental changes currently underway. We advocate a pluralistic approach that incorporates a suite of guiding principles, including historical fidelity, autonomy of nature, ecological integrity, and resilience, as well as managing with humility. The relative importance of these guiding principles will vary, depending on management goals and ecological conditions

Managing for resilience through a portfolio approach to reducing climate risk

Climate change promises to erode ecosystems and undermine more than a century of conservation gains. Protected area managers can no longer expect protection or restoration alone to sustain ecological integrity and instead must identify strategies to increase the resilience of ecosystem elements as ecosystems change. To “buy time” for diverse, future ecosystems to develop, conservation priorities should focus on maintaining those elements that take a long time to develop, including soils and the genetic diversity in populations. Unfortunately, uncertainty about the future of ecosystems under climate change dictates that it is unknowable which strategy will work “best,” and a “portfolio” of approaches must be tried to spread the risk of loss. We argue that protected area adaptation is best served by allocating wildlands to three zones: 1) a Restoration Zone where whole ecosystems are actively maintained and change is resisted, 2) an Observation Zone where directional change is accepted, and 3) an Innovation Zone where change is guided into conditions unlike the past but with a better chance of sustaining highly valued ecosystem elements and processes in the long term. Such a spatially explicit approach can provide a framework for evaluating the appropriateness of various “adaptation options” and facilitate adaptive management to minimize climate risk. The presentation will close with consideration of criteria to guide allocation of the landscape to the portfolio

The Uses of Completed Landfills

Completed landfills can provide the base for parks and other beneficial land uses, thus serving to recycle waste products into new forms. However, the conversion is not trouble-free. This paper examines some of the uses to which completed landfills have been put as well as the problems which have been encountered to date, and suggests actions which planners and solid waste managers can take to mitigate some of these problems in the future. Information is based largely on experiences in Los Angeles County, California, where landfilling has been both practised and studied over an extended period