Page 64 - A bird’s-eye view of recreation - Rogier Pouwels
P. 64

 A bird's-eye view of recreation
publications about recreational disturbance and birds (Kerbiriou et al., 2009). Overall, these studies conclude that recreational activities have diverse impacts (Blanc et al., 2006, Hill et al., 1997) that differ between bird species (Møller, 2008), but have little or no effects at the population level (Blanc et al., 2006). Most research demonstrates immediate responses of individual birds to visitor appearance such as a change in physiology or behaviour. For instance, human presence generates stress and birds may stop foraging (Thiel et al., 2011, Strasser and Heath, 2013). In such studies short term effects on individuals or breeding pairs are considered (Le Corre et al., 2009); for instance, a change in parental care (Yalden and Yalden, 1990) reduced foraging time resulting in lower survival rates (Goss-Custard et al., 2006, Stillman et al., 2007) or lower reproduction success (Langston et al., 2007, Murison et al., 2007, Yalden and Yalden, 1990, Strasser and Heath, 2013). Few studies deal specifically with the long term impact of recreation on bird populations (Le Corre et al., 2009), such as Mallord et al. (2007) and Kerbiriou et al. (2009) who both used simulation models to translate lower densities and reproduction success to population size and viability. Thus, implications of recreation to the objectives of biodiversity policy are still poorly quantified.
In protected areas management plans should ideally guide future developments while acknowledging targets that have been set concerning bird conservation (Dudley, 2008, Hockings, 1998). When management plans incorporate visitor management next to conservation management, managers are confronted with difficulties (Eagles et al., 2002). First, managers often lack monitoring data on recreational use (Buckley et al., 2008, Mann et al., 2010) and therefore are not informed about the visitor distribution, which particularly in large areas is often heterogeneous. Without explicit spatial information about visitor density it is difficult to predict impacts on breeding birds. Second, for most protected areas bird monitoring data are available but impact studies for recreational disturbance on bird populations are lacking (Sutherland et al., 2006), because managers lack resources to determine the impacts (Reed and Merenlender, 2008). Third, the scale of conservation objectives and the management of the area often differ jurisdictionally, temporally and spatially (Cash et al., 2006). For many areas one of the main challenges is to define responsibilities between different local managers regarding the realization of the conservation objectives (EC, 2014). In addition most management actions are local, while the survival of bird populations depends on management in a wider region (Opdam, 2014). Together with the lack of information and the mismatch that results from the differing scale of conservation objectives and
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