School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD 4072, Australia.
WILD Foundation, 717 Poplar Avenue, Boulder, CO 80304, U.S.A.
Conserv Biol. 2018 Feb;32(1):116-126. doi: 10.1111/cobi.12976. Epub 2017 Dec 6.
Wilderness areas are ecologically intact landscapes predominantly free of human uses, especially industrial-scale activities that result in substantial biophysical disturbance. This definition does not exclude land and resource use by local communities who depend on such areas for subsistence and bio-cultural connections. Wilderness areas are important for biodiversity conservation and sustain key ecological processes and ecosystem services that underpin planetary life-support systems. Despite these widely recognized benefits and values of wilderness, they are insufficiently protected and are consequently being rapidly eroded. There are increasing calls for multilateral environmental agreements to make a greater and more systematic contribution to wilderness conservation before it is too late. We created a global map of remaining terrestrial wilderness following the established last-of-the-wild method, which identifies the 10% of areas with the lowest human pressure within each of Earth's 62 biogeographic realms and identifies the 10 largest contiguous areas and all contiguous areas >10,000 km . We used our map to assess wilderness coverage by the World Heritage Convention and to identify gaps in coverage. We then identified large nationally designated protected areas with good wilderness coverage within these gaps. One-quarter of natural and mixed (i.e., sites of both natural and cultural value) World Heritage Sites (WHS) contained wilderness (total of 545,307 km ), which is approximately 1.8% of the world's wilderness extent. Many WHS had excellent wilderness coverage, for example, the Okavango Delta in Botswana (11,914 km ) and the Central Suriname Nature Reserve (16,029 km ). However, 22 (35%) of the world's terrestrial biorealms had no wilderness representation within WHS. We identified 840 protected areas of >500 km that were predominantly wilderness (>50% of their area) and represented 18 of the 22 missing biorealms. These areas offer a starting point for assessing the potential for the designation of new WHSs that could help increase wilderness representation on the World Heritage list. We urge the World Heritage Convention to ensure that the ecological integrity and outstanding universal value of existing WHS with wilderness values are preserved.
荒野地区是指生态完整、主要不受人类活动影响的景观，特别是不会产生大量生物物理干扰的工业规模活动。这一定义并不排除依赖这些地区维持生计和生物文化联系的当地社区对土地和资源的使用。荒野地区对生物多样性保护至关重要，维持着关键的生态过程和生态系统服务，这些过程和服务是地球生命支持系统的基础。尽管荒野地区具有广泛认可的好处和价值，但它们的保护不足，因此正在迅速受到侵蚀。越来越多的人呼吁多边环境协定在为时过晚之前，为荒野保护做出更大、更系统的贡献。我们采用已确立的最后一片荒野方法，创建了一个全球剩余陆地荒野地图，该方法确定了地球 62 个生物地理区域中每个区域内人类压力最低的 10%区域，并确定了 10 个最大的连续区域和所有大于 10,000 公里的连续区域。我们使用该地图评估了《世界遗产公约》对荒野的覆盖情况，并确定了覆盖范围的差距。然后，我们在这些差距中确定了具有良好荒野覆盖范围的大型国家指定保护区。四分之一的自然和混合（即具有自然和文化价值的地点）世界遗产地（WHS）包含荒野（总面积为 545,307 公里），约占世界荒野面积的 1.8%。许多 WHS 拥有极好的荒野覆盖范围，例如博茨瓦纳的奥卡万戈三角洲（11,914 公里）和苏里南中部自然保护区（16,029 公里）。然而，世界上 22 个（35%）陆地生物区系在 WHS 中没有荒野代表。我们确定了 840 个大于 500 公里的保护区，主要是荒野（占其面积的 50%以上），代表了 22 个缺失生物区系中的 18 个。这些地区为评估指定新的 WHS 的潜力提供了起点，这有助于增加世界遗产名录中荒野的代表性。我们敦促《世界遗产公约》确保具有荒野价值的现有 WHS 的生态完整性和突出的普遍价值得到保护。
