Integration of Sustainable Management of Wildlife Resources and Wildlife Habitats in a Participatory Cross-Sectorial Concept for Sustainable Landuse in the Biosphere Reserve Wienerwald

The project has been submitted and approved as a three-year project. By utilising the future Biosphere Reserve Wienerwald as a model of approaches to sustainable development, the proposed project shall provide a knowledge-base and assessment, management and monitoring tools for the integration of sustainable management of wildlife resources into across-sectoral approach to overall sustainable land use. Responding to an unsatisfied need for developing truly integrated concepts of assessing sustainable use across all relevant economic sectors, the project design applies a participatory, problem-driven, interdisciplinary and applied research approach to accomplish these objectives. Therewith, the project seeks to provide major contributions to closing gaps in existing research activities on Austrian Biosphere Reserves. Regional stakeholders and parties concerned will be involved in all major stages of the work process, encompassing information, consultation and participation. Based on a stakeholder analysis, a long-term multi-sectoral stakeholder platform for co-operation, communication and conflict management will be established. Organisation and steering of the participatory process will build on extensive experiences gathered from various previous projects of consortium members, e. g. on regional development, sustainable hunting and Wildlife-Ecological Spatial Planning. Surveys of stakeholders and regional experts from all involved land use sectors will be carried out, in order to gather information on stakeholder attitudes, on critical wildlife- and land use-related issues and on local knowledge. Recommendations for the long-term continual of the stakeholder platform will be provided, thereby establishing favourable conditions for future implementation activities. The applicability of the existent "Criteria and Indicators of sustainable Hunting" (UMWELTBUNDESAMT, 2001; 2005) to the Biosphere Reserve shall be examined by field testings and interviews with hunting managers. Based on the evaluation of the practical performance of the assessment set, it will be adapted to the specific conditions and requirements of the Biosphere Reserve, leading up to regionalised, advanced and amended principles, criteria and indicators (PCI) for wildlife management that cover ecological, economic and socio-cultural aspects of sustainable use. The resulting PCI set will be discussed and co-ordinated with stakeholders, aiming at improvement and maximum consideration of comments. Based on evaluation of stakeholder surveys, feedback from stakeholder meetings, field investigations and scientific expertise, the interactions and interdependencies between wildlife resources, wildlife management and other involved sectors of landuse will be analysed, including GIS-based analysis of data. As an intermediate result, a cross-sectoral set of relevant wildlife-land use interfaces will be identified. The development of a cross-sectoral set of ecological, economic and socio-cultural principles, criteria and indicators for these interfaces involves a number of work steps that will take place partly in serial, partly in parallel order. Based on an operational methodological approach to the set-up of a cross-sectoral assessment framework, the PCI set of sustainable wildlife management, assessment approaches of other landuse sectors, as well as further sectoral concepts of sustainable use (sustainable forest management, eco-tourism, etc.) will be examined as to their compatibility with and applicability to the identified set of interfaces. Existent sustainable use approaches will be interdigitated, their problem-adequacy will be investigated and a gap analysis will be performed. Implementing preceding project results, and based on a review of approaches that are existent on a regional scale, concepts for a wildlife-related master management plan and for a monitoring system will be developed.