In search of the management model of the nature reserve as a sustainable tourist destination

Abstract

The demand for tourism and recreation in natural landscapes is steadily growing and the offers of tours are outstripping the solution of problems and issues related to the management of such destinations. The practice of using natural reserves as tourist destinations sets the task of conscious reconciliation of nature conservation and tourism functions. In foreign practice, this task is traditionally solved for such forms as national parks. In Russia, along with national parks, nature reserves are increasingly becoming a common and accessible form for recreation, and it is in their territories that we most often observe a conflict of nature management. On the one hand, nature reserves are very attractive for recreation and tourism, since there is practically no protection regime for their valuable natural complexes. On the other hand, its function as a natural reserve is incompatible with anthropogenic impact from recreation activity. The study of recreation and tourist flows carried out by us is interesting because its object is atypical for the tourist function of reserves – nature reserves, and the subject of the study is not route-organized tourist and recreational flows, but the areal nature of their tourist development. In the course of the tourist and recreational flows studying in the Kurgalsky Nature Reserve of the Leningrad region and assessing their impact on natural complexes, among other tasks, we made an attempt to determine the conceptual and methodological foundations of monitoring to ensure a sustainable management model for such a destination as a nature reserve. The substantiation of the monitoring methodology as a tool for implementing a sustainable management model of a nature reserve as a tourist destination is the content of this article.