Evaluación de la gestión del medio natural en espacios naturales protegidosel Parque Regional de Carrascoy y El Valle (Murcia, España) y el Parque Natural Serra da Estrela (Portugal)

Abstract

Sometimes natural areas have suffered excessive anthropogenic pressure: agriculture, grazing, land clearing, forestry and hunting, among others. Their declaration as protected areas, together with social concern for their conservation and maintenance, have led to the need to verify whether they comply with the established conservation and protection objectives in their management; It is necessary to evaluate management through appraisal. Given that the central element of these areas is the natural environment, the evaluation can be carried out on the management of the natural systems, geosystems, present in the protected areas. The main objective is to establish the agile way to evaluate the management of the natural environment in protected natural spaces in relation to the objectives of their creation and justification of their maintenance. For this, the indicators of land cover, habitat fragmentation, presence of solid waste and accessibility were used. An equation of the state of the geosystem was established, where the indicators constitute the independent variables, with previously scaled values (between 0 and 2), which added give a total result between 0 and 8, the first reflecting the worst state of the system and the other the best. For its application, various research plots were selected in two disparate mountain territories, the Serra da Estrela Natural Park, in Portugal, and the Carrascoy and El Valle Regional Park, in Spain. The results showed greater deterioration in plots such as Torre del Planalto and ski resort (Portugal) and Rambla del Puerto de La Cadena (Spain). Of the total plots, 5 in Portugal and 3 in Spain, 4 obtained the maximum value of 8, of which 3 are located in the Portuguese natural park. By indicators, the worst results corresponded to habitat fragmentation and the best to accessibility, with all plots reaching the maximum value of 2. To evaluate fragmentation, the so-called NATURFRAG was created, where the total habitat fragmentation is the sum of the results obtained when applying the fragmentation index of the Basque Government to the study of its natural habitats, with some modifications, and the index that relates perimeter and surface of the Ministry of the Environment of Spain. This value is then divided by 2 to obtain the arithmetic mean. Regarding the accessibility index, the inclusion in future studies of small communication routes such as roads less than 3 m wide should be considered due to its influence. In conclusion, both the methods and techniques used can be extrapolated to other different territories, with notable climatological, geological and environmental differences, as in this study. It is proposed to improve the most critical spaces studied, those that obtained the worst rating, and the establishment of permanent research plots. This way of evaluating involves an agile approach to the situation of the geosystem, and if the results are close to zero, the situation of the system in question must be delved deeper into.