In recent decades various international organizations have stressed the need to incorporate citizen participation in the processes of landscape protection, management and planning. For many years, hunting management has played an important role in the landscape shaping of a lot of Spanish rural areas. Sustainable hunting has been an economic activity that contributes to the multifunctionality and rural development of some protected areas in Spain. The application of art. 7 of Law 30/2014 (of December 3, on National Parks), has led to the ban of hunting in all the Spanish National Parks since December 2020. The abolition of hunting in these spaces is expected to trigger some significant landscape changes. For instance, in the absence of natural predators, a large part of the scientific community warns of the risk of overpopulation of different species of wild ungulates (deer, wild boar, Pyrenean ibex, …), leading to unknown ecological consequences. Likewise, the hunting ban is also expected to have several socio-economic effects on local communities such as the lack of incomes from hunting tourism or the increase of wildlife damage on farming systems. The projected scale of the landscape changes linked to the prohibition of hunting in the Spanish National Parks is already causing strong social reactions against and in favour of this restriction. In this context, the present work aims to make a first step toward understanding social attitudes around the prohibition of hunting in the Biosphere Reserve of Sierra Nevada (Spain). Through an online questionnaire the perception of local communities about landscape changes related to the hunting ban in the Sierra Nevada Biosphere Reserve is evaluated. Within the framework of landscape democracy, the study also aims to identify the aspirations of the locals regarding future landscape management of the protected area in the context of the hunting ban.
JOSÉ LUIS SERRANO-MONTES (1); LUZ MARÍA MARTÍN DELGADO (2); JONATAN ARIAS-GARCÍA (3) & JUAN IGNACIO RENGIFO GALLEGO (4)
(1) Department of Human Geography, University of Granada (Spain); (2) Department of Geography, University of Valladolid (Spain); (3) Department of Regional Geographic Analysis and Physical Geography, University of Granada (Spain); (4) Department of Art and Territory Sciences, University of Extremadura (Spain)
ID Abstract: 103