Mapping threats to wilderness character in the National Wilderness Preservation System

Mapping wilderness in China: Comparing and integrating Boolean and WLC approaches

“…In geographically diverse countries such as China, it is necessary to apply and adjust the proposed method at regional and local scales to support on-the-ground wilderness protection projects in the future (Flanagan & Anderson, 2008;Carver et al, 2012;Carver et al, 2013;Orsi et al, 2013;Ceauşu et al, 2015;Lin et al, 2016;Măntoiu et al, 2016;Tricker & Landres, 2018;Adhikari & Hansen, 2018). At a local scale, more accurate datasets with on-the-ground validation are required.…”

Evaluating Potential Impacts of Proposed Industrial Access Road Routes on Wilderness Character in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, Alaska

“…To map potential impacts to wilderness character from the Ambler Mining Road, we follow the approach first identified by Carver et al (2013) and used for a number of wildernesses throughout the NWPS (Tricker and Landres, 2018). First, the hierarchical framework is used to identify and organize specific measures that represent impacts to wilderness character for a given area.…”

“…The data representing each measure are converted to grids at a specified resolution, and the grid values are normalized to a standardized scale so they can be evaluated together (Carver et al, 2012). Finally, the standardized grids are combined using the weighting scheme to create composite raster-based maps for the indicators and qualities; these maps are then combined to create an overall map of impacts to wilderness character (Tricker and Landres, 2018).…”

“…Throughout this analysis, we define potential impacts as the effects that will likely occur from the construction and industrial use of the road on all the qualities of wilderness character. Following established terminology for monitoring and mapping wilderness character (Landres et al, 2015;Tricker and Landres, 2018), we refer to impacts that adversely affect wilderness character from its existing, pre-road baseline condition as degrading wilderness character.…”

“…The analysis is structured using the conceptual framework of wilderness character developed by a collaboration of the four U.S. federal agencies with nationwide administrative responsibility for managing wilderness (Landres et al, 2015): the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service (FS), U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service (NPS), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). This framework is used to develop a spatially explicit analysis of potential impacts on wilderness character from both proposed alternative routes of the Ambler Mining Road based on mapping techniques developed from 10 years of research in eight U.S. designated wildernesses (Carver et al, 2013;Tricker and Landres, 2018). The analysis of potential impacts to wilderness character presented here complements recent analyses of potential impacts of the proposed Ambler Mining Road on the Western Arctic caribou herd (Wilson et al, 2014) and on subsistence (Guettabi et al, 2016).…”