Parks Canada’s Greg Horne presented Jasper National Park’s wilderness strategies at a PAN Parks conference in Europe recently.

Horne, a resource management and public safety specialist for Parks, was surprised to find many similarities between European parks and Canada’s national parks. 

The conference was held during Wilderness Days at the Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park in Georgia. There were 18 countries represented by 70 participants, including Horne and two other North American parks representatives. Horne spoke about the role of rangers in implementing wildlife practices. 

The biggest difference between Canadian national parks and most in Europe, is that European parks have less opportunities for over-night travel, and much higher usage. Many European parks are extremely small, and many staff are not immersed in them as Park Wardens are in Canadian parks like Jasper. In Canada, wardens live in backcountry areas for much of the year. 

Horne said many parks in Europe have not been protected as Canadian parks are. Some PAN parks are zoned to allow activities like animal grazing, mushroom picking and tree harvesting. 

“Our definition of a national park is different compared to different countries in Europe,” Horne said. “It’s just a different philosophy of protection.”

That protection can vary, and what works in Canada isn’t necessarily great for a European park.

“What is a good policy to do in Spain, might be a crazy, ridiculous thing to do in Bulgaria,” Horne said. “Every country has its own issue.”

The North American parks that were invited included Horne, Rocky Mountain National Park Director Vaughn Baker and Ralph Swain, regional wilderness program manager for the U.S. Forest Service. The three represented large-scale wilderness management. 

Horne said they spoke, “to show what is possible, and they have to adopt it to their scale. There are some big landscape success stories.”

Many European parks are heavily used, and Horne said it is much different here in Canada, where hikes into the backcountry can be done without seeing another person.

“Having wilderness is an important resource, and I think in Canada we under-value it,” he said. 

Horne added that having few users in Jasper National Park is both a good thing and a bad thing; the positive is that people can experience true wilderness, the negative is that these spaces could be threatened if people do not enjoy and understand their value. It also speaks to the number of parks in Canada; lack of use could mean park users are spreading out more across the country. 

When developments happen in wild spaces, Horne believes the impact of these losses is going by without enough debate. He believes years down the road there will be questions raised as to why it was allowed to happen in the first place.

Horne was surprised to see many parks practices he believed were unique to Canada being used in Georgia and other European parks. Parks Canada has implemented the use of trail cameras to track wildlife and confirm rare species’ existence in parks. In Georgia, the Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park is using camera technology to track the elusive Persian Leopard. 

“They extensively are using trail cameras,” Horne said.

The leopard is an endangered species that has been threatened by poaching. Horne said the poachers seem to be finding the animals, but wildlife biologists are not. 

“Some wildlife is so rare, you have to use cameras to even confirm its place on the landscape,” he said. 

So far the Persian Leopard has not been spotted, so Georgian parks staff are moving the cameras up into higher alpine areas in hopes to catch a glimpse of the beautiful cat. As of 2008, it is estimated that as few as five leopards remain in Georgia.

Finding the leopard would be significant, as many European parks have a shortage of big animals. While elk can be a nuisance to Jasperites when they block traffic, such a phenomenon is unheard of in Europe.

“We take for granted our large animals that we see everyday,” Horne said. 

Poaching is a problem in Europe. Often the practice is for trophy hunting, but animals can also be killed to put food on the tables of hungry families. Poaching can also mean taking trees from areas not zoned for it. 

“We think of poaching for the large animals,” Horne said.

After the conference, Horne participated in a four-day tour of the Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park.