| Abstrakt: |
Open landscapes are common, valued park resources that serve as vital wildlife and plant habitats as well as sites for diverse visitor activities. Although the National Park Service (NPS) actively manages these resources, open landscapes are subject to a variety of ecological pressures exacerbated by anthropogenic threats, including intense visitor use that is often not well documented despite its managerial relevance. Established and valuable counting methods exist to estimate visitor use at static locations, yet open landscapes present special monitoring challenges because of multiple points of visitor access and limited or no containment infrastructure. In this article we present an accessible, replicable, and acceptably accurate method developed for monitoring visitor use and its spatial distribution in open landscapes. This method was implemented in three high-use meadows of Yosemite National Park in the summer of 2011. We highlight the data utility and analytical options, evaluate the benefits and limitations, and discuss the potential for volunteer involvement to sustain longitudinal data collection. Additionally, we provide suggestions of other open landscapes suitable for implementation of this method, such as coastal and urban-proximate units of the National Park System. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
