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Creating Balance Between Park Use and Sustainable Environments

Creating Balance Between Park Use and Sustainable Environments

June 3, 2021 | OTAK Team

Outdoor recreation in America is booming. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis shows that the outdoor recreation economy accounted for 2.1% of the gross domestic product (GDP) for 2019 and all estimates indicate the next report will only grow that number. And it’s no wonder—spending time outdoors has proven to have both physical and mental health benefits and, during the pandemic, proved to be one of the few activities we could still enjoy.

But the number of people swarming into parks has a downside that a team from Otak is directly addressing with the goal of keeping open spaces truly open, enjoyable, and safe, while also protecting natural resources.

Otak has a long history of working with the National Park Service to both improve visitor experiences and safety, while also protecting natural, cultural, and historical resources. Through this work, we have witnessed the tremendous benefits people experience from being in national parks, but also the toll of high visitor use on parks and open spaces. Recognizing a pressing need as park usage continues to rise, in March of 2021 Otak brought on a team of social scientists, based in New England, to expand the focus of our projects through the lens of minimizing overcrowding, creating more efficient people movement, and ensuring safe opportunities for park visitors. The team, comprised of Steve Lawson, director of Visitor Use Planning and Management, and research analysts Abbie Larkin, Bill Valliere, and Annie Engen, has been working together for many years and collectively have vast amounts of experience working on both high-profile projects from Arches National Park to Mt. Everest, to smaller town parks. 

The popularity of outdoor recreation has skyrocketed putting a strain on natural resources.

The team had collaborated with Otak on several occasions which sparked the eventual hirings, an effort that was led by Mandi Roberts, Vice President and Principal at Otak who comments,

“By bringing this experienced and talented team into the fold of Otak, we are able to offer an even greater breadth and depth of services to clients, and in particular for the NPS, where social science and visitor use studies are needed on a constant basis. Our team is ready to assist in developing the best solutions for current and future generations of visitors and stewards of our cherished landscapes and settings in America.”

Visitor Use Planning and Management

As more people visit parks, there is increasing pressure on park resources that impacts the quality and character of visitors’ experiences and the overall perception of parks. Learning to identify problems and develop the tools and strategies to minimize impacts is critical to the sustainability of the parks and is the exact focus of this new Otak team. “We provide a data-driven basis for decisions on managing people and protecting the parks, while also providing outstanding experiences to all visitors,” Steve says.

Steve explains that his work involves social sciences, systems modeling, natural resource economics, and park and wilderness management. “I have been applying these skills and training for about 25 years to design and conduct social science research for the National Park Service (NPS) and other recreation resource managers. Our team provides NPS and others with information about who does and does not visit parks, what motivates them to come to parks, and what they do when they visit. We help build a data-driven understanding of visitor perceptions, preferences, and tolerances for park conditions and attitudes and opinions about how to manage use for public enjoyment and resource protection,” he says.

The work Steve and his team conduct requires analysis and modeling of visitor use and patterns. They use survey research and descriptive data collection including GPS and passive mobile data, automated counts of traffic and trail use, and observation studies of the number of people and types of activities and behaviors. The gathered data is used to develop insights about the relationships in parks among the amounts and types of visitor use, the quality and character of visitors’ experiences, and the conditions of park resources.

Case Study: Yosemite National Park Half Dome 

Yosemite National Park proved to be a case study on how to better manage visitors through a reservation system.

Steve was instrumental on an NPS project at Yosemite National Park where he was commissioned to study visitor use, crowding, and safety on one of the park’s most popular and iconic hikes, Half Dome. On the last leg of the hike, hikers scale a granite face using handrails that were originally bolted into place in the early 1900s by the Sierra Club. As the hike gained in popularity, the lines for the cables grew and visitors began to make the risky decision to scale outside of the cable area to circumvent crowds and get to the summit faster. These issues drew increasing attention in the press and increasing concern from park managers who decided it was time to address the problem.

Steve and his team conducted a multi-year study where they developed a simulation model of the number of total visitors on the hike, the number of visitors on the cables at one time, as well as the number of visitors going outside the cables and exposing themselves to greater risk. The findings became a primary basis for the Half Dome Stewardship Plan Permit System where the park now manages how many visitors it can sustain at one time and issues the corresponding number of permits per day. As Steve explains, “This became a precedent-setting example of how to effectively and proactively manage visitor use in popular outdoor recreation settings.” The Half Dome permit system “provided  for other park managers to acknowledge there are limits to the amount of use that can be sustained beyond which the fundamental values of these areas can be compromised.” 

The results of this project were widely published to provide an evidence-based solution to decision-makers who could point to peer-reviewed science as a basis for management decisions. In addition, the project increased awareness of the potential problems in parks. 

Long lines waiting to summit Yosemite’s iconic Half Dome created a dangerous situation.

Precedent-Setting Management

Reservation systems are becoming a part of the landscape and conversation in places where they may be needed. The idea is not to “lock people out” but rather to maximize the opportunities for people to experience these places while at the same time protecting park resources.

Steve explains that in places he’s worked where reservation systems have been assessed or implemented, it is possible in some of those cases to accommodate more visitors while still protecting the environment, by virtue of a proactive management system. Parks data demonstrate recreational use is inherently concentrated in time and space, and use generally has seasonal, daily, and hourly peaks “That leaves a lot of potential opportunity on the table to help disperse and manage peak use, but if you passively allow visitation patterns to persist, you may not be making the most of the resources,” he says.

The permit system at Half Dome was a precedent-setting decision by the Park Service as one of the most prominent locations to manage day use. It has led other parks to consider and implement day-use management with reservation systems in national parks such as California’s Muir Woods and Maine’s Acadia National Park as well as popular state hiking trails across the country. Steve explains, “All of the work is structured around a framework that is applicable to each and every kind of place. It’s a sliding scale of analysis. Arches, for example, is at the high end of the scale where decisions should be supported with a data-driven and peer-reviewed basis. But we also work through general legal requirements for use management plans where the use is maybe not intense but nonetheless, there are requirements to have a use plan. In some of these cases, we are at the lower end of the sliding scale of analysis, where extensive data and analysis are not necessary or feasible.” He adds that the approach and level of investment are context-dependent but the management framework that he and his team use applies universally to parks, protected areas, and tourist destinations.

Prior to the pandemic, Steve was invited to Nepal to present his findings to the managers of Mt. Everest, a site challenged by the impacts and risks of overuse. Compounding the problem for the managers is the need to overcome the stigma that quotas will limit tourism to an area where peoples’ livelihood relies heavily on tourism dollars. Steve felt he was making headway to help Nepal develop strategies for sustainable tourism management before the pandemic put this work on hold.

The pandemic exacerbated the issues and challenges in natural areas that are facing higher and higher levels of visitation. The boom in outdoor recreation has shone a light on how critically important the role of parks and recreation are to our society and how much that use needs to be sustainable to ensure what we love about parks today remains for generations. With Otak’s new team in place, we stand ready to help park managers achieve balance in welcoming all visitors and providing enriching experiences while ensuring park resources are protected.

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