ON NATURAL HERITAGE AND LANDSCAPE MANAGEMENT IN THE AGE OF PROTECTED NATURAL AREAS: THE CASE OF INVERTEBRATES

In the last decades, as far as management of the natural heritage is concerned, Protected Natural Areas have gained great importance in conservation biology as they have been established as valuable conservation management areas for fauna and flora species. These spaces are often surrounded by farming and stockbreeding areas, with which they form landscape units of high relevance for biodiversity conservation. To analyze the role of these landscape units as mosaics of interconnected areas of interest to wildlife species and communities of high ecological value constitutes a necessary and general interest aim concerning the sustainable management of the landscape and natural heritage. These circumstances apply to many populations of invertebrates and insects within such landscape units, previously in the background with respect to other elements that have generated more social or scientific interest, owing to their crucial role in the maintenance of ecosystem diversity and population flow inside and outside the Protected Natural Areas, and also because they sometimes constitute biodiversity units upon which the management of these spaces has been based. In this paper, we try to show, through the case of Lepidoptera (Hexapoda), the importance of an integrated management of natural heritage and landscape in Spain for the conservation of invertebrates and insects, all within the context of conservation biology.