Abstract
Based on data of visitors to national parks, nature reserves and wildlife sanctuaries in Sarawak, this study’s objective is to use the spatial and temporal analysis to describe the underlying trend and temporal pattern of local and foreign visitors and ultimately infer the temporal distribution of visitors to 18 different TPAs. The second aim of the study is to cluster the visitors according to the location of TPAs using Wards hierarchical clustering method. By comparing average monthly visitors’ count, we observed that the average number of monthly visitors significantly reflects the distribution concentration of visitors based on the spatial map. Findings indicate that the monthly distributions of local and foreign visitors differ according to different TPAs. The spatial and temporal analysis found that local visitors’ arrival is high at the end of the year while foreign visitors showed significant arrival during the months of July, August and September. The Wards minimum variance method was able to cluster TPAs local and foreign visitors into very high, high, medium and low visitor area. This study provides additional information that could contribute to identifying the periods of highest visitor pressure, design measures to manage the concentration of visitors and improve the overall visitors’ experience. The findings of the study are also important to respective local authorities in providing information for planning and monitoring tourism in TPAs. Consecutively, this will ensure sustainability of TPAs resources while protecting their biodiversity.
Highlights
National parks in Sarawak are open to the public with certain entrance fee for recreation, trailing, camping, sightseeing and educational activities
Nature reserves have the same purpose as national parks except that they are smaller in size which are less than 1000 ha
The number of visitors endured a decline where foreign visitors declined by 2.40%, while domestic visitors decreased by
Summary
Natural areas such as national parks, nature reserves and wildlife sanctuaries have gained great attention recently. These areas represent the ecosystem for each country and are amongst the chosen destinations for nature-based tourism. Some other benefits obtained from ecotourism are forest protection, preservation of wildlife, maintenance of cultural traditions, gender equality, and social cohesion [1,2]. Preparing forests with infrastructure to attract and educate visitors has been reported of importance. Tourism attractiveness can be segmented into primary and secondary attributes. Secondary attributes are related to tourist infrastructure.
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