The Role of Tourism Impacts on Cultural Ecosystem Services

Taff Taff,D'antonio D'Antonio,Miller Miller,Benfield Benfield,Schwartz Schwartz

doi:10.3390/environments6040043

Taff Taff, D'antonio D'Antonio + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/environments6040043

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Abstract

Parks and protected areas are recognized for the important ecosystem services, or benefits, they provide society. One emerging but understudied component is the cultural ecosystem services that parks and protected areas provide. These cultural ecosystem services include a variety of benefits, such as cultural heritage, spiritual value, recreation opportunities, and human health and well-being. However, many of these services can only be provided if people visit these parks and protected areas through tourism opportunities. However, with this tourism use comes a variety of inevitable resource impacts. This current research connects potential impacts from tourism in parks and protected areas to the health and well-being aspect of cultural ecosystem services. We used an MTurk sample to record affective responses across a range of resource conditions. Results demonstrate that as tourism-related ecological impacts increased, positive affect decreased. Decreases in positive affect were more severe for park and protected area scenes featuring informal and/or undesignated social trails when compared to scenes with increasing levels of trampling/vegetation loss. Collectively, the results show that managing tourism in parks and protected areas in a manner that reduces impact is essential to providing beneficial cultural ecosystem services related to human health and well-being.

Highlights

Parks and protected areas are increasingly being recognized for the human health and well-being benefits they provide [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
This study suggests that when visiting park and protected area settings where visitors are more compliant with management strategies, including indirect approaches such as those promoted by the Leave No Trace Center and similar minimum-impact ethics programs, visitors may experience higher levels of positive affect, and greater achievement of cultural ecosystem services
This study examined the connection between tourism-related impacts in parks and protected areas and the possible interference of these features on cultural ecosystem services, aspects of health and well-being

Summary

Introduction

Parks and protected areas are increasingly being recognized for the human health and well-being benefits they provide [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. These benefits, referred to as ecosystem services, continue to be quantified with regard to their provisioning, regulation, and support [8]. Daniel et al [9] (2012) and the Millennium Assessment Ecosystems and Human Well-being Synthesis (2005) [10] have highlighted the complexities of measuring cultural ecosystem services that arise from the often intangible or subjective nature of data associated with these functions.

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