Charting the uncharted. Making space for climate change science in Alpine protected areas

Released under the Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) in the series Nuove Geografie. Strumenti di lavoro

Protected areas are among the most common and successful instruments for conserving the environmental features of different regions. Basing their effectiveness on the paradigm of spatial segregation, or their capacity to block out of their borders undesired environmental pressures, they carved their space into the fabric of lands and territories worldwide.
However, climate change is leading the scientific community to a turning point in designing conservation plans and practices: no matter how tall the fences are, how deep the helms, and how strict the laws, protected areas cannot held climate change on the edge of their borders, but need adaptation pathways to the new climatic conditions. Adapting to climate change is, first and foremost, a science-driven endeavour, that should embrace the best scientific information available. Interestingly, the genesis, mobilisation, and circulation of science all display spatial variability, as space plays a role in creating scientific knowledge that is notably unrecognized. Building on the literature inherited by the field of the geography of science, the research experiments an array of computational and qualitative methodologies to reconstruct the landscape of science making in protected areas. The final goal is to shed light on the geography of scientific information that shapes the Alps, one of the most crucial conservation regions in Europe, in the face of the looming changes that global warming entails.