Abstract Wilderness has recently re-emerged as a key landscape quality in the public debate in Europe, experiencing renewed appreciation in terms of tourism and nature conservation. At the same time, wilderness has turned into a critical matter of conflict, calling for a better understanding of the public’s varied views on wilderness and the spatial localisation of areas of potential conflict. In this paper, we explore the plurality of existing public wilderness representations combining qualitative evidence from 21 semi-structured interviews with quantitative data from a large-scale questionnaire survey (n = 858) conducted in the region of South Tyrol in the Central Alps. This is complemented with a GIS-based approach to quantify and map the geographic coverage of the different representations of wilderness. Our study reveals three distinct public wilderness representations, i.e. ‘Area with no human impact’, ‘Remote and large area’, and ‘Area where nature can self-develop’, differing in terms of selection and weighting of wilderness attributes. The translation of wilderness representations into maps shows clear differences in spatial distribution, location, and extent of areas with high wilderness quality across the three representations. We further demonstrate the added value of our approach by comparing the results with a standardised, expert-based approach on wilderness quality mapping, finding that the extent of areas of high wilderness quality significantly varies depending on whether the mapping is based on experts' or public's representation of wilderness. We therefore conclude that recognising public wilderness representations and their plurality is fundamental for identifying areas of potential conflict and sustainably managing wild landscapes.

中文翻译：

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排序“荒野”：荒野的公共表现形式及其空间分布的变化

摘要 荒野最近重新成为欧洲公共辩论中的一个关键景观质量，在旅游和自然保护方面重新受到重视。与此同时，荒野已成为冲突的关键问题，呼吁更好地了解公众对荒野的不同看法以及潜在冲突地区的空间定位。在本文中，我们将 21 次半结构化访谈的定性证据与在中阿尔卑斯山南蒂罗尔地区进行的大规模问卷调查 (n = 858) 的定量数据相结合，探讨了现有的公共荒野表征的多样性。这与基于 GIS 的方法相辅相成，以量化和绘制荒野不同表现形式的地理覆盖范围。我们的研究揭示了三种不同的公共荒野表征，即“没有人类影响的区域”、“偏远和大面积的区域”以及“自然可以自我发展的区域”，它们在荒野属性的选择和权重方面有所不同。将荒野表示转换为地图显示了三种表示中具有高荒野质量的区域在空间分布、位置和范围方面的明显差异。我们通过将结果与基于专家的标准化荒野质量绘图方法进行比较，进一步证明了我们方法的附加值，发现高荒野质量区域的范围因绘图是基于专家还是公众而存在显着差异荒野的代表。