A GIS Approach to Estimating Tourists' Off-road Use in a Mountainous Protected Area of Northwest Yunnan, China
2014
Yang, Mingyu | van Coillie, Frieke | Liu, Min | de Wulf, Robert | Hens, Luc | Ou, Xiaokun
To address the environmental impacts of tourism in protected areas, park managers need to understand the spatial distribution of tourist use. Standard monitoring measures (tourist surveys and counting and tracking techniques) are not sufficient to accomplish this task, in particular for off-road travel. This article predicts tourists′ spatial use patterns through an alternative approach: park accessibility measurement. Naismith's rule and geographical information system′s anisotropic cost analysis are integrated into the modeling process, which results in a more realistic measure of off-road accessibility than that provided by other measures. The method is applied to a mountainous United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site in northwest Yunnan Province, China, where there is increasing concern about potential impacts of unregulated tourist use. Based on the assumption that accessibility tends to attract more tourists, a spatial pattern of predicted off-road use by tourists is derived. This pattern provides information that can help park managers develop strategies that are effective for both tourism management and species conservation.
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