Different people, different wild: Comparing and mapping wilderness representation in Wuyishan National Park, China

Abstract

It is essential to better integrate wilderness representations of different stakeholders into wilderness conservation. The way in which local residents and other stakeholders frame the construction of wilderness of protected areas in developing countries are poorly understood. In these areas, land use policy and decision may lead to conflicts. This study aims to explore existing public wilderness representations using a questionnaire survey (n = 514) administered amongst tourists and other stakeholders in the Wuyishan National Park, in southeast China. The spatial differences in public representations of wilderness across different stakeholder groups were compared against expert knowledge. We found that integrated wilderness representation maps of different stakeholder groups were consistent, namely ‘area where wild animals live’, ‘area with no human influence’, ‘a barren and lonely area’. However, three sub-representations of the individual stakeholders varied significantly. Moreover, expert-based wilderness mapping did not reflect public representations accurately, and an integrated wilderness quality map considering wilderness representations across both stakeholders and experts can better identify detailed wilderness areas. Our study provides new insights and technical support for future exploration of wilderness conservation and mapping in China and other countries with insufficient awareness of wilderness values and investigations in a regional scale.

Keywords

Wilderness mapping / Public participation / Environment perception / Protected areas

Ethical statement

Ethical approval was not required for this study since human participants were ensured following local legislation and institutional requirements. All proceeds of this research were carried out following the Helsinki Declaration principles of human subject investigation. Participation in this survey was anonymous and voluntary, assuring consent of prospective respondents before participation. Data accumulated for this research was treated confidentially.

Declaration of Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge funding from the Fujian Provincial Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 2022J01613), the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program (Grant No. 20223080018), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 51978365, 72241410). We thank editors and two anonymous reviewers for useful feedback on previous versions on this paper. We also thank the Wuyishan National Park Management Bureau for assistance with survey and data provision.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2023.12.002.

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