Integrated Approach for the Inventory and Management of Geomorphological Heritage at the Regional Scale

Due to the renewed interest for sites of geological interest, both in nature conservation and tourist sectors, numerous regional and national geosite inventories have been carried out in several countries during the last two decades. Several research groups discussed methodological issues, in particular concerning the assessment, and proposed various assessment methods. The University of Lausanne developed a method for assessing the scientific and additional values of geomorphosites in 2007. The method was widely used in regional inventories in Switzerland and abroad. This paper presents a new version of the method and discusses four main issues: (1) the assessment methodology is included in a larger process, from the selection of potential geomorphosites to their use and evaluation by stakeholders; (2) a particular attention is put on the selection of potential geomorphosites that will then be assessed and a simple approach crossing a spatial selection (the selected geomorphosites should be representative of the regional geomorphological processes) and a temporal one (the selected geomorphosites should cover the whole temporal stages of the regional morphogenesis, with both relict and active landforms) is proposed; (3) a new part is added in the assessment method; it concerns the use characteristics and fills a gap in the existing method; (4) finally, the paper discusses mapping and representation issues: specific maps are produced at two levels: simple geomorphological maps accompany the assessment of each geomorphosite and synthetic maps, covering the whole study area, are produced for the communication of results to stakeholders. For this, four types of representation (qualitative, univariate, bivariate, multivariate) are proposed. The method is illustrated by three examples of inventories carried out in Western Switzerland and Haute-Savoie (France).