**6. Conclusions**

Biodiversity conservation and management in Spanish-protected areas have evolved over time in a significant way, and especially the Galician Atlantic Islands National Park, one of the two maritime-terrestrial National Parks in Spain. Prior to its declaration as a National Park, during the 20th century the islands that form it were gradually depopulated, which caused the abandonment of agrosystems and their substitution by natural habitats recovery. But from the 1950s the PFE first, and ICONA second, transformed coastal scrubs and dune systems by afforestation with exotic species (some of them invasive species), constituting a decrease in the conservation value of the islands, as high-natural value habitats are substituted by low-natural value forest formations. During the 1960s and 1970s the uncontrolled visitors caused a lot of damages to the natural heritage of the archipelagos. The Cíes Natural Park declaration in 1980, and subsequently the establishment of several protection measures in the rest of the archipelagos, helped to halt the biodiversity loss in these islands.

Finally, the declaration of the Maritime-Terrestrial Galician Atlantic Islands National Park introduced a new way of management under scientific-technical criteria, that was executed in these four archipelagos through developing conservation actions to restore habitats, assessing the conservation problems, and halting the impacts. This change of perspective made possible a significant improvement of the conservation status of natural ecosystems, allowing new declarations of a huge number of protected areas at regional, national, European, and international level, overlapping and reaching important synergies between them.

So this National Park has become a reference in Galician and Spanish conservation scheme, as a lot of visitors travel to the islands in order to know first-hand the natural values that have motivated the declaration of all those different categories of protected areas. This has led to establish the National Park planning several limits of number of visitors depending on the island, the season, or the type of tourism they are developing.

Nowadays, new challenges arise in the National Park, such as the removal and control of plant invasive alien species, the elimination of senescent forest formations, or the restoration of natural ecosystems using characteristic plant species of insular habitats employing local and compatible genetic material for plant production. The genetic characterization of the insular plant reproduction material, versus the continental one, appears as one of the future fields for further research in the archipelagos. The start of new European initiatives to achieve these goals within the islands, establishing important synergies with other countries, is a valid alternative and powerful for reaching success in improving the conservation status of natural habitats and wildlife.

*Galician Atlantic Islands National Park: Challenges for the Conservation and Management… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101844*
