In addition to providing key ecological functions, large old trees are a part of a social realm and as such provide numerous social‐cultural benefits to people. However, their social and cultural ...values are often neglected when designing conservation policies and management guidelines. We believe that awareness of large old trees as a part of human identity and cultural heritage is essential when addressing the issue of their decline worldwide. Large old trees provide humans with aesthetic, symbolic, religious, and historic values, as well as concrete tangible benefits, such as leaves, branches, or nuts. In many cultures particularly large trees are treated with reverence. Also, contemporary popular culture utilizes the image of trees as sentient beings and builds on the ancient myths that attribute great powers to large trees. Although the social and cultural role of large old trees is usually not taken into account in conservation, accounting for human‐related values of these trees is an important part of conservation policy because it may strengthen conservation by highlighting the potential synergies in protecting ecological and social values.
The Australian Government's 'Caring for our Country' program has undermined Australia's 'regional model' for natural resource management, and eroded gains made under the precursor Natural Heritage ...Trust and related programs, in eight significant ways. Contrary to expectations that Caring for our Country, established in 2008, would build on the foundations established by the Natural Heritage Trust, it has adopted a narrower agenda, increased central government control, and compromised buy-in by state and territory governments. In reaction to the difficulty of assessing the cost-effectiveness of natural resource management program investments, priority has been given to discrete projects capable of demonstrating short-term, measurable outputs. Implementation of Caring for our Country has failed to realise the aspirations of regional organisations for core funding, substantially increased transaction costs and diminished success rates under competitive funding arrangements, and prejudiced the goodwill of many in the natural resource management community. Commitment to local community natural resource management movements like Landcare has been inconsistent, and largely unsuccessful. Retracting investment in relevant research and development, notably the termination of Land and Water Australia in 2009, has severely limited knowledge creation and sharing to inform and strengthen the regional model. We contend that the Australian Government should revisit its strategy for enabling and sustaining natural resource management investment, and that there is a substantial body of evidence in favour of approaches based on the regional model.
The paper analyses the representation and occurrence of topics about heritage in Croatian Science textbooks for the 4th-grade primary school, published by the leading Croatian textbook publishers and ...approved by the Croatian Ministry of Science and Education. The conducted research aimed to determine the representation and appearance of heritage topics in the mentioned textbooks and, based on the results, to provide guidelines for further activities and necessary research to improve the quality of teaching heritage content in the lower grades of primary school. It was established that the greatest attention was paid to tangible cultural heritage, and the least to intangible cultural heritage. It would be good to include more tasks in the textbooks that would encourage the observation of cause-and-effect relationships in the actions of people on natural and cultural heritage and encourage students to reflect on concrete procedures for preserving and protecting the same. Considering teachers' freedom in accessing and teaching certain teaching contents, which the new curriculum of Science and curriculum of cross-curricular topics provide, the question of access and competence of teachers in teaching heritage topics in class is opened.
Abstract
The results show that: (1) the contribution rate of the four ecological indicators on the first principal component (PC1) is more than 90%. The construction of RSEI based on PC1 is ...applicable in Karst World Nature Heritage Sites (WNHS) and can be used to monitor and evaluate the spatial and temporal variation characteristics of ecological environment. (2) The mean values of RSEI of Libo-Huanjiang heritage site during 2000, 2007, 2013 and 2020 were 0.5435, 0.5465, 0.6009 and 0.5101, The overall ecological quality is mainly moderate and good, but in the eastern part of the heritage site the ecological quality is poor. (3) The evolution of ecological environment quality during the 20 years is mainly divided into the development trend of rapidly getting better, slowly getting better, and maintaining stability. (4) In the analysis of the relationship between RSEI and altitude, it is found that the ecological environment quality is mainly inferior, less favourable and moderate in areas with altitudes below 600m, and there is a positive relationship between ecological quality level and altitude. (5) By analyzing the ,apparent spatial aggregation between ecological environment quality, and then simulating the ecological grades in 2027 and 2033 using CA-Markov model, it is predicted that the area of medium and excellent ecological grades will increase in the future, but the ecological environment quality still needs to be improved in the eastern region due to the development of tourism industry. Overall, the remote sensing ecological index is an effective model for evaluating and monitoring the ecological environment quality of karst heritage sites; the ecological environment quality of Libo-Huanjiang heritage site is in a steady state of improvement, and the conservation measures of relevant departments are beginning to bear fruit; further coordination between conservation and development is needed to promote the sustainable development of heritage sites and to provide effective solutions for monitoring other karst-like heritage sites.
Using a mixed-methods approach, this study investigates value co-creation within the context of natural heritage tourism. It focuses on those visiting the largest lake-water cave in the world: ...Alisadr, Iran. Semi-structured interviews (n = 22) were conducted to explore visitor experiences, complemented by a face-to-face questionnaire (n = 850) investigating the relationships among perceptions of value co-creation, leisure involvement, perceived experience value, satisfaction, and braggart word-of-mouth. The findings demonstrate that perceived value co-creation, leisure involvement, and perceived experience value influence visitor satisfaction and braggart word-of-mouth, with theoretical and managerial implications provided by way of conclusion.
Forest degradation occurs in natural World Heritage Sites (WHS) in the Global South despite the implementation of various strategic policies and the World Heritage Convention (WHC) on forest ...protections of the sites and this poses challenges to improving natural heritage sustainability. The current study aims to investigate spatial determinants of forest degradation in the Kilimanjaro WHS, Tanzania, to support strategic policies for forest landscape protection and natural heritage sustainability. Using remotely sensed, Digital Elevation Model, and tourism location data, we performed the supervised classification of satellite images, Digital Elevation, Euclidean distance, and linear regression modeling to identify spatial determinants of forest degradation. Our key findings indicated that while spatial determinants vary with different locations, human (tourism) activities e.g., developments of campsites, picnics, tourist routes, the historical site, and attraction areas are associated with forest degradation in the southern parts of the site. In addition to human activities, natural factors such as low levels of elevation and degrees of slope are associated with forest degradation at the site. However, in the northwest and southwest of the site, high degrees of slope are associated with the degradation. Our findings showed that while bare land surface encroached the primary forest with about 2.88%, moorland vegetation encroached the primary forest with about 16.95%, indicating a large degradation of the primary forest with about 19.83% for the past four decades. The information provided in this study is crucial to support site managers and decision-makers in strategic policies and WHC implementations on forest protection for natural heritage sustainability.
The paper describes the history of discovery and study of karst formations of the European North of Russia. More than 100 karst formations have been identified. The main periods in the history of ...exploration of caves and grottoes of the Pechora Urals are reflected. The first caves descriptions which were made by travellers and scientists in the 18th19th centuries are given. During that period the most famous caves were Uninskaya and Kaninskaya caves. The main karst formations were discovered and described at the beginning of the 20th century. Geologist V.N. Mamontov discovered 4 caves on the Pervokamennaya River. Systematic geological studies by V.A. Varsanofyeva in the Northern Urals allowed her to discover small karst formations in the upper reaches of the Pechora on the Ilych and Unya rivers. In 1960, B.I. Guslitzer discovered the largest cave in the Northern Urals — the Medvezhya Cave. Promising and little-studied areas of karst are the Bolshezemelskaya Tundra, the Polar and Nether-Polar Urals, Pai-Hoi and Timan. Only a few small caves and grottoes are known on these territories. Most of the karst is located in specially protected areas. The caves are unique paleontological monuments of nature. The funds of the A.A. Chernov Geological Museum of the Institute of Geology contain 12 monographic collections of paleofaunistic material with a volume of more than 30 thousand storage units. The remains of vertebrate caves consist of bones of mammoth fauna and small mammals.
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