Linking Culture and the Environment

24 Recreation Ecology in Sustainable Tourism and Ecotourism
and soil erosion (Wilson and Seney, 1994). The noise associated with motorized
activities may displace animals from larger areas than human-powered
types of recreation (Knight and Gutzwiller, 1995).
Impacts may occur wherever visitor activities are concentrated: on trails or
campsites, along riverbanks and lakeshores, and at attraction features such as
waterfalls, coral reefs or wildlife viewing areas. Visitor use is typically distributed
unevenly within protected areas, with limited areas of concentrated activity,
larger areas of dispersed activity and the majority of areas with limited or
no activity (Cole, 1987; Henry, 1992). Impact may be distributed as linear disturbance
along trail corridors, which in turn connect nodes of disturbance at
recreation and attraction sites (Manning, 1979). At the local scale, impacts are
also unevenly distributed within recreation sites or along trail corridors, reflecting
differential amounts of use or environmental durability, respectively.
The influence of environmental and use-related factors
Differences in environmental attributes may modify the type and extent of
visitor impacts. For example, the flexible stems and other morphological
characteristics of grasses make them far more resistant to trampling than the
rigid stems of many broad-leafed herbs (Liddle, 1997). Differences in plant
morphology and environmental conditions also create substantial variation
in the ability of plants to recover following disturbance. Soil moisture and
nutrients, growth rates and length of growing season are other important
factors that influence recovery rates. Similarly, soil types and associated
properties vary in their susceptibility to compaction, erosion and muddiness
(Leung and Marion, 1996; Hammitt and Cole, 1998).
Substantial attention has been focused on the relationship between
amount of use and amount of resource impact (Cole, 1987; Kuss et al., 1990).
Previous research consistently documented a curvilinear response pattern
for many types of impact, with substantial change occurring at low levels of
use followed by diminished increases in impact as use rises to moderate and
high levels (Marion and Merriam, 1985; Cole, 1987). For example, most vegetation
ground cover is lost on trails and campsites shortly after they are
opened for use. Figure 2.2 illustrates this generalized curvilinear use–impact
relationship. Different environments or ecological communities may exhibit
varying responses to impact force, as portrayed by two curves with different
degrees of curvilinearity in Fig. 2.2 – curve (a) indicates a highly sensitive
environment, whereas curve (b) represents a less-sensitive environment with
a more gradual response to changes in amount of use. An important management
implication of this relationship is that most types of impact can be substantially
reduced only if visitor use is limited to extremely low levels.
Accordingly, an effective management strategy is to concentrate tourist activities
on a small number of established trails and sites where impacts tend to
stabilize (Hammitt and Cole, 1998; Leung and Marion, 1999). This containment
strategy is often accompanied by judicious selection of resistant sites to
limit the severity and spatial extent of impact.