The overall aim of this book is to examine the environmental impacts of a range of outdoor activities, to understand how these can be minimised by various management approaches, and to see if education of the recreationists is one approach that can be successful in reducing the environmental impacts.
1.1 Outdoor Recreation
This refers to outdoor leisure activities which take place in natural or at least semi-natural locations in the countryside. When that recreation involves excitement, real or perceived risk, or physically challenging situations, it is referred to as adventure recreation and is carried out for physical or social, goal-related benefits by individuals or groups. The benefits are predominantly physical, such as physical health, but they can also be mentally, emotionally, and spiritually rewarding. At the same time, the physical activity often gives pleasurable appreciation of the environment where the participant finds peace in nature, relaxes, and enjoys life. The activities are often used as a means of educational and team-building goals.
1.2 Recreation Impacts and Recreation Ecology
In this book we define a recreational environmental impact as any undesirable, negative, visitor-related, biophysical change to natural resources, such as vegetation, wildlife, soils, and water, which can be an agent of change in the natural landscape. How acceptable such visitor impacts and changes are is debatable and based on value judgements, but the effective land management actions either to avoid or more likely to minimise the environmental impacts should depend on scientific knowledge related to soil science, geomorphology, ecology, and hydrology and the numbers and types of impact caused by the recreationists.
This branch of science is called recreation ecology, defined as the study of ecological changes associated with visitor activities, including the role of influential factors, both in natural and semi-natural areas (Liddle 1997; Monz et al. 2010; Hammitt et al. 2015). As a field of study, it seeks to develop a deeper understanding of the role and function of all the factors that influence visitor impacts and thus the probability of selecting sustainable management remedial actions. The best visitor impact management is seen to arise from collaborations between recreation ecologists, social scientists, experienced recreation land managers, recreation stakeholders, and the recreationists themselves. There are many outdoor recreation activities that contribute to these ecological changes, and we will consider here what we consider to be some of the most important. There are many gaps though, and some topics are considered in more depth than others. However, some of these gaps are covered in Liddle (1997) and Buckley (2004, 2006), such as the impacts on terrestrial wildlife and birds and the impacts and management of tourist engagements with cetaceans (Higham and Lusseau 2004). We consider the individual outdoor recreation activities and the environmental impacts that they can cause and attempt to outline the numbers involved in each activity, but this is an extremely difficult task. Then the management and educational options are considered in order to minimise the recreational environmental impacts for each activity. The difficulty in estimating the numbers involved in these activities and in different world regions can be illustrated, for example, by the work of Balmford et al. (2015) who tried to estimate the global number of visits per year to protected areas, which they considered to be about 8 B visits/year, of which over 80% were in Europe (3.8 B) and North America (3.3 B). However, given the confidence intervals for the global total (5.4â18.5 B/year), there could be wide discrepancies in the assumed figure, but it is considered implausible that the figure could be fewer than 5 B/year. This is because there were several conservative aspects to the calculations, for example, the exclusion of ~40,000 very small sites and the incomplete nature of the world database for protected areas. This seems to be supported by three national estimates: the 2.5 B visit days/year to US protected areas in 1996 (Eagles et al. 2000), the over 1 B visits/year (although many of these were cultural) to Chinese national parks in 2006 (Ma et al. 2009), and the 3.2â3.9 B visits/year to all British âecosystemsâ in 2010 (Sen et al. 2012). As these figures are generally for several years ago, todayâs figures are likely to have increased markedly. Similar imprecise figures for individual activities are found worldwide, although there are relatively accurate figures for the USA, UK, Australia, and parts of Europe. We give estimates for each outdoor recreation activity in every chapter.
As an example of how the recreation management system for protected areas is operated in one part of the world, we will look in detail at the USA, because this is well documented by legislation and by a system that caters for large numbers and is relatively well organised throughout the country.
1.3 The Recreation Management System in the USA
The National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS) and the four federal management agenciesâthe Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Forest Service, and the National Park Service (NPS)âmanage 765 wilderness areas, across some 110 million acres of protected lands. The NPS alone accommodates over 330 million visitors per year, up from 275 million in 2008, which presents managers with major management challenges. These visitor figures have grown considerably since the 1964 Wilderness Act, and currently the wilderness area represents about 5% of the USA. An increasing number of visitors inevitably contribute negative effects to fragile natural, historical, and cultural resources. Such visitation-related resource impacts can degrade natural conditions and processes and the quality of recreation experiences. However, although greater physical numbers must mean more negative impacts, it is also visitor behaviour and the spatial management of these visitors that are keys to minimising impacts.
The term wilderness is defined as an area where the earth and community of life are not changed by man and where man himself is a visitor who does not remain and as an area of undeveloped federal land which retains its primeval character and influence without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions. This type of land appears to have been affected mainly by the forces of nature, and the imprint of manâs activities is mostly unnoticeable, and there are outstanding opportunities for solitude and an unconfined type of recreation. Mostly these wilderness areas are at least 5000 acres in size which makes their preservation and use practicable in an unimpaired condition; but these areas also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value. However, there are no specific criteria in law, although the Wilderness Act prohibits commercial activities, motorised access and roads, structures, and facilities, but there are exceptions in Section 4d of that act (Hoover 2014). According to the NPS Management Policies, the fundamental purpose of the national park system, established by the Organic Act and reaffirmed by the General Authorities Act, as amended, begins with a mandate to conserve park resources and values. The fundamental purpose of all parks also includes providing for the enjoyment of park resources and values by the people of the USA (NPS 2006, section 1.4.3). However, what might appear to be a dual mandate, visitation and resource protection, is clarified to reveal the primacy of resource protection. The Management Policies acknowledge that some resource degradation is an inevitable consequence of visitation but directs managers to ensure that any adverse impacts are the minimum necessary, unavoidable, cannot be further mitigated, and do not constitute impairment of, or to detract from, the original park resources and values (NPS 2006).
Four federal land management agencies are responsible for the stewardship of these wilderness, protected lands: the NPS (~44 million acres), the Forest Service (~36 million acres), the Fish and Wildlife Service (~21 million acres), and the Bureau of Land Management (~9 million acres) (Marion et al. 2016). These lands are largely in Alaska, California, Arizona, Idaho, and Washington (in total nearly 80% in these areas). The professional stewardship of these lands is to maintain their wilderness character which requires objective information about internal and external threats. Recreation is one of the main internal threats, despite being recognised as one of the core traditional uses of wilderness.
1.3.1 US National Park Service
We now describe how the NPS in the USA is organised as the increasing popularity of the national park system presents substantial management challenges. Too many visitors may cause unacceptable impacts to fragile natural and cultural resources and may also cause overcrowding and other social impacts, which can also degrade the quality of visitor experiences. Questions that are often posed are: how many visitors can ultimately be accommodated in a park or related area? And, how much resource and social impact should be allowed? These and related questions are commonly referred to as visitor capacity (Manning 1999; Stankey and Manning 1986; Shelby and Heberlein 1986; Graefe et al. 1984). Sustaining any type of long-term natural resource monitoring programme over time can be exceptionally difficult for management agencies due to changing personnel, management priorities, growth in numbers, and relatively low budgets. Initially the legislative and management intent regarding visitor impact monitoring and its role in balancing visitor use and resource protection objectives are described and reviewed.
Legislative mandates challenge managers to develop and implement management policies, strategies, and actions that permit recreation without compromising ecological and aesthetic integrity. Furthermore, managers are often forced to engage in this balancing act under the close scrutiny of the public, competing interest groups, and even the courts. Managers can no longer afford to adopt a wait-and-see attitude, or rely on subjective impressions of deterioration in resource conditions. Professional land management increasingly requires the collection and use of scientifically valid research and monitoring data. Such data should describe the nature and severity of visitor impacts and the relationships between controlling visitor use and biophysical factors. These relationships are complex and not always intuitive. A reliable information base is therefore essential to managers seeking to develop, implement, and gauge the ...
