David Huddart - Outdoor Recreation: Environmental Impacts and Management

Here we define outdoor recreation, recreation impacts, and recreation ecology which are at the core of this book. The management of wilderness recreation in the USA is discussed as an example of how a recreation management system for protected areas operates, in particular how the National Park Service (NPS) has been controlled by legislative acts, policies, and guidelines. Strategies for defining visitor carrying capacity and monitoring visitor impacts are discussed along with site and visitor management techniques and strategies for educating the recreationists. The NPS originally employed the Visitor Experience and Resource Protection and decision-making framework for evaluating the visitor carrying capacity limits and currently uses the Visitor Use Management planning framework and decision-making framework which are described in this chapter.

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.

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.

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 ). As these figures are generally for several years ago, todays 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.