Conservation Reserves Management Strategy 2003 - Parks Victoria

these reserves (over 90%) are Natural Features Reserves, less than 10% are Nature ConservationReserves, and none are Historical and Cultural Features Reserves.TABLE 20NUMBER AND PERCENTAGE OF CONSERVATION RESERVES WITH KNOWN ABORIGINALHISTORICAL PLACES FOR EACH CATEGORYRESERVE TYPENO. RESERVES WITHABORIGINAL HISTORICALPLACESNO. ABORIGINALHISTORICAL PLACESRESERVES WITHPLACES AS A % OFALL RESERVESNCR 2 3 < 1NFR 21 32 1HCFR 0 0 0Total 23 35 13.1.7 Visitors servicesOver 90% of Conservation Reserves have no Visitor Sites 1 . In contrast to Parks, most have fewvisitors and visitor monitoring is not usually undertaken. Only 4% of all Conservation Reserves haveone or more Visitor Sites recorded in the Levels of Service database. Of the 94% of ConservationReserves that are not included in the database, it is assumed that most have few visitors and novisitor facilities. 2The greatest number of Conservation Reserves with Visitor Sites are Natural Features Reserves (82),which have more than four times as many reserves with Visitor Sites than both Nature ConservationReserves (18) and Historic and Cultural Features Reserves (16). However, Historic and CulturalFeatures Reserves have the highest percentage of reserves with Visitor Sites: 15% of Historic andCultural Features Reserves have Visitor Sites, compared with less than 5% of both NatureConservation and Natural Features Reserves.Visitor sitesVisitor numbersAlthough 43% of Conservation Reserves with Visitor Sites have 5000 or fewer visitors per year, eachConservation Reserve category has at least one reserve that is estimated to receive over 50 000visitors per year (Table 21). These high-visitation reserves (Table 22) comprise less than 10% of eachreserve type with Visitor Sites and are located across six Parks Victoria districts.TABLE 21VISITOR NUMBERS FOR CONSERVATION RESERVES WITH AT LEAST ONE VISITOR SITERESERVE CATEGORYVISITOR NUMBERS (' 000/YEAR)< 5 5 – 10 10 – 50 > 50 NOT AVAILABLENCR 11 4 2 1 0NFR 33 26 14 7 2HCFR 6 4 4 1 1Total 50 34 20 9 31 A visitor site is defined as a destination visitors go to that have four or more ‘attributes’ such as car parking and signage orranger presence and risk mitigation. Infrastructure such as roads, bridges and walking tracks is not currently counted as visitorsites. Information on infrastructure such as condition is recorded in the Maximo database but was not included in this overview.2Source of data: PV Levels of Service (LOS) database. Note that many reserves have more than one visitor site. For example,Murray River Reserve has >70 sites and the relevant data is listed for each in the database. For reserves with more than oneVisitor site, the highest categories recorded for visitor numbers and service levels were used.31