Linking Culture and the Environment

Y.-F. Leung et al. 25
Amount of impact
+
Infection points
(a)
(b)
0
Amount of use
+
Fig. 2.2. Generalized relationships between visitor use and resultant resource impacts.
Visitor behaviour can also influence the type and extent of environmental
impacts. Vegetation and soil disturbance may be avoided or minimized
by selecting resistant surfaces or vegetation for travel and camping.
Area of disturbance is minimized when visitors constrain their activities
to existing disturbed surfaces – by staying on established trails, travelling
single file in the centre of the tread, or camping within core areas of established
sites. Such low-impact travel and camping skills are the focus of the
Leave No Trace outdoor skills and ethics programme, which will be
described shortly.
Effectiveness of management interventions
Protected area managers can avoid or minimize visitor impacts by influencing
factors related to both visitation and the environment within which
use occurs. Visitation can be shifted from fragile (e.g. critical wildlife habitats)
to more resistant or resilient locations. Visitor activities can be concentrated
on hardened sites or facilities maintained to sustain high levels of
use. Higher impact activities can be prohibited or restricted to areas best
able to accommodate such use. Low-impact visitor behaviour can be
encouraged through education or required through regulations. Finally,
rehabilitation efforts can facilitate recovery on recreation sites unacceptably
degraded by visitor use.
Recent years have seen increasing attention paid to empirically examining
the effectiveness of such management and restoration actions as mentioned
above. For example, Reid and Marion (2005) monitored campsite impacts in
Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, USA, before and after a change of
camping policy in 2000. They found that newly implemented visitor containment
measures using designated and established sites resulted in a 51%
reduction of land disturbance and a 44% reduction of vegetation loss. Several
other studies also supported the effectiveness of designated site policy in
controlling resource impacts by visitors (Marion and Farrell, 2002) or packstock
(Spildie et al., 2000). Similarly, Marion (1995) found a 50% reduction in