Is There Something Wild in Austria?

Abstract

This chapter presents the first spatially explicit wilderness map for the Austrian territory. This is modelled using the spatial patterns of four aspects of wilderness, an approach developed by the Australian Heritage Commission: remoteness from settlements, remoteness from access, apparent naturalness and biophysical naturalness. In order to combine these four layers we applied two approaches, which reflect two different aspects of wilderness quality, namely a weighted overlay and a minimum operator. These two approaches were merged to gain a spatially explicit estimation of the wilderness continuum for all of Austria. By applying two different thresholds to the continuum, we identified core as well as extended areas, which can be considered as wild areas with high potential for wilderness. In total 1.98 % and 6.16 % of the country can be classified as core and extended areas, respectively. The vast majority of these areas are located in mountain regions with higher elevations occurring especially in the western parts of Austria. Despite some shortcomings of this approach, e.g. the lack of data describing extensive land use like grazing, we hope that this assessment can serve as a policy- and management relevant tool to improve wilderness quality in Austria.