Abstract
Many threatened species rely on ecotourism for conservation funding, but simultaneously suffer direct ecological impacts from ecotourism. For a range of IUCN-Redlisted terrestrial and marine bird and mammal species worldwide, we use population viability analyses to calculate the net effects of ecotourism on expected time to extinction, in the presence of other anthropogenic threats such as poaching, primary industries and habitat loss. Species for which these calculations are currently possible, for one or more subpopulations, include: orangutan, hoolock gibbon, golden lion tamarin, cheetah, African wild dog, New Zealand sealion, great green macaw, Egyptian vulture, and African penguin. For some but not all of these species, tourism can extend expected survival time, i.e., benefits outweigh impacts. Precise outcomes depend strongly on population parameters and starting sizes, predation, and ecotourism scale and mechanisms. Tourism does not currently overcome other major conservation threats associated with natural resource extractive industries. Similar calculations for other threatened species are currently limited by lack of basic population data.
Highlights
A primary goal of conservation is to maintain biological diversity, principally by minimising species extinctions [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
Relevant population parameters are lacking for other threatened species influenced by ecotourism [59,60]
For orang-utan, at low ecotourism intensities, positive net ecotourism effects are outweighed by commercial logging
Summary
A primary goal of conservation is to maintain biological diversity, principally by minimising species extinctions [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Public protected areas provide the main mechanism, but conservation measures on other public, private and communal lands are increasingly important [2,3,8,9,10,11,12,13]. Shortage of funds is a major barrier to each [9,10,11,12,13,14,15], and conservation on all land tenures relies increasingly on ecotourism for financial and political support [14,15,16,17,18]. As ecotourism is used and advocated more widely in conservation [15,16,17,18,23,24,25], quantifying its net outcomes has become correspondingly urgent
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