research on effects of toursim in national parks

Because so few people visit each year-only about 40,000 but increasing-the park was an ideal place to locate this study, Prugh explains.

Most visitors arrive on cruise ships, but the boats don’t dock on shore, and the park has very little human foot traffic. The researchers based the study in Glacier Bay National Park, a coastal area in southeast Alaska that is accessible only by boat or plane. “These results are striking in showing that really any level of human activity can have an effect on wildlife.” “There’s been increasing recognition of how much just the presence of humans in these places, and our recreating there, can impact wildlife,” says senior author Laura Prugh, associate professor in the University of Washington School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. In these heavily used areas, one might expect animals to change their behavior to avoid humans.īut the new study in the journal People and Nature finds that nearly any level of human activity in a protected area like a national park can alter the behavior of animals there. National park traffic has grown steadily over the past decade, and popular parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone can easily see over a million visitors a year. Even in remote, rarely visited national parks, the presence of just a few humans affects the activity of wildlife that live there, a new study shows.

Research on effects of toursim in national parks