PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
The Sierra de Ancares mountains, straddling the regions of Galicia and Castile-Leon, are an area of great natural wealth, with numerous habitats and species of Community interest. They also mark the south-western limit of the range of the brown bear and could be the key to its future expansion. The Ancares de León have been declared a site of Community importance and, like the Ancares de Galicia, have been proposed for inclusion in the Natura 2000 network.
The biggest threats faced by the Sierra de Ancares were rejection by the local population of the management of the area by the authorities, growing tourism in the area and the failure of the managers of the hunting grounds which cover much of the area to take account of the presence of protected species there. This all led to destruction of habitats by fire, disturbance of wildlife, and killing of bears in hunting accidents or by poachers.
OBJECTIVES
The objective of this project was to ensure coordinated management of two adjoining protected sites under different regional authorities: Castile-Leon and Galicia. The conservation measures for these areas would be brought together in a joint management plan and some of them would be implemented jointly in the two adjoining regions during this LIFE project.
The joint action in this project focused on habitats and species classified as priority for the purposes of the Habitats Directive. In particular, action would be taken against the threats to bears, such as tourist pressure and hunting, by introducing a monitoring system based on consensus with the sectors of society concerned. Attempts would also be made to promote expansion of the species throughout the Ancares mountains and the creation of biological corridors with the aid of measures to restore forest habitats of Community interest in the area. Finally, an extensive awareness-raising campaign would attempt to involve all sectors of local society in the conservation of its natural resources.
RESULTS
An important achievement of this project was the effective establishment of an inter-regional coordinated framework to tackle conservation issues in the framework of the Natura 2000 network. The approach followed could contribute to generate useful models for joint management of natural areas split into different administrative boundaries, where the distribution of competencies among regions makes it difficult to implement a coherent management system. This was achieved through setting up a coordination committee between the Ancares pSCI in León and an adjacent pSCI of Galicia. The committee met regularly and adopted decisions that settled common foundations for topics such as the planning of both sites or the adoption of synergetic measures for the management of habitats and species. The activities effectively coordinated, dspite some initial delays, finally rendered the most satisfactory results of the project. Unfortunately, the coordination scheme was not fully applied, e.g. for the direct management of habitats in the boundaries of the two administrations involved. This approach to coordinated planning and decision making should be maintained in the future, at least for certain species of Community interest and their habitats.
Management planning drafts for both pSCIs involved in the project were important project outcomes, which would be rounded off on the date they are officially adopted. Both documents propose the creation of Natural Parks in the overall surface area of the Natura 2000 sites, seeking the recovery of the sites’ natural features and their socioeconomic activity, and propose a zoning and basic management guidelines. These documents contain measures dealing with the conservation of the habitats and species of the annexes I and II present in the target sites, though a tighter integration of the Natura 2000 objectives in the documents would have been desirable.
A particularly innovative experience of this project was the development of an noteworthy approach to the problem of connectivity, applied to the case of the species of Community interest found in the project's site. A study work was implemented to identify landscape corridors useful for Habitats Directive species and for birds listed in Annex I of the Birds Directive, based on the current scientific methodological approaches to address them, but with clear management purposes. By the project end, its results were being applied to plan the restoration and management needs of the two adjacent pSCIs, contributing to dealing with the growing concern of allowing the movement of wildlife between optimum habitat areas.
Improving the conservation status of the brown bear Ursus arctos and other significant species, such as the capercaillie Tetrao urogallus, was an important objective that was satisfactorily met. The Ancares area is important for the expansion of the Western Cantabrian brown bear nucleus, and several activities were carried out to consolidate its increasing role as a passing area for dispersion and also as feeding habitats for some animals:
Restoring habitats of Community interest, i.e. 9230, 9260, 9380, and 4030, was one of the project’s expected results, but the forestry actions finally gave priority to the brown bear habitat and gave less attention to the formerly mentioned habitats. A coordinated approach to habitat restoration with the neighbouring Galician authorities, which could have been a very interesting experience, was finally dismissed too. No specific management measures were proposed for the annex I habitats in the management plans either, as they focused mainly in the conservation of the brown bear and the capercaillie. This could have been due to a higher background and settled awareness as regards species management than habitats, a problem to be addressed after the project's end.
The final major objective of the project was to integrate the local society in the conservation management of the site. The awareness of local people was satisfactorily improved, thanks to a widespread presence of the project in the area, achieved by means of a good distribution of a series of information bulletins regularly edited, the presence of the bear patrol, which played an important information role, and a conference cycle carried out about opportunities for sustainable development. This measure focused on the development opportunities created by the Natura 2000 network for such a severely depressed rural area. However, a lot of work still needed to be done and in the near future the effort should be maintained in order to settle the new ideas and guarantee a stronger development of new economic activities.
In the end some of the main problems linked to the uses of the local population were successfully addressed, such as the problems of unaware hunting, poaching and other inadequate practices (e.g. snares). Arson fires, an endemic problem to this area that threatens the forest habitats and the species linked to them, is the most relevant pending problem to be solved.
