Map nature areas for outdoor life

Published on January 7, 2022

The guide provides support for municipalities' mapping of nature areas that are suitable for outdoor life. The survey contributes to the municipalities' basis for physical planning. The guidance is primarily aimed at municipal employees who work with physical planning. Actors who have an interest in how the municipality's land is used, such as organizations, companies and landowners, also benefit from the information. This is brought through seven steps

Guidance on mapping areas for outdoor life is a seven-step method. The work begins with the municipality establishing a working group. This working group will carry out the survey and be a reference group that can provide input during the process. Caution must be taken to involve people early in the work who have valuable knowledge and interest that can contribute to the mapping. This is as reference groups would add knowledge. Working group should be open to actors who are interested in the mapping and informs and takes in views from the public. This would make it politically based and that the working group has a clear mandate and resources to carry out the survey. The mapping of areas for outdoor life should, as far as possible, be based on existing data. It limits the work effort and provides consistency with other planning in the municipality. The basic principle for the collection is that data should have a high level of detail, be relevant and have local relevance. Once the collection of existing data has been collected, the working group assesses what additions are needed to be able to carry out the mapping of outdoor areas. This can be, for example, new investigations or field mapping. The working group defines area types / categories. The categories cover everything from small and urban areas to extensive wilderness areas. The closer to urban areas the area type is, the more important the level of detail in the mapping. Areas that do not have qualities of importance for outdoor life are not included as an area type. They proceed to the valuation of the areas' qualities and shortcomings. Through the evaluation, you get out what needs to be protected or developed to meet people's interests and needs for outdoor areas, for example, highlighting experience qualities, barriers, degree of accessibility, among other things. This paves the way for the working group will now weigh together and classify the evaluation results for the different areas to see who gets the highest score and then visualizes and document them. The mapping and documentation needs to be reviewed and updated at regular intervals.