Page 106 - A bird’s-eye view of recreation - Rogier Pouwels

A bird's-eye view of recreation
6.2.1 Connect the perspectives of managers, stakeholders and scientists
The more credible, salient and legitimate knowledge and tools are, the more useful they will be in decision-making process for all the parties involved. However, individuals in mixed groups will perceive and value each of these three attributes differently (Cash et al. 2002, Cook et al. 2013, Heink et al. 2015). To account for this variation in perception and valuation, I developed scientific tools that are able to link management actions to acknowledged stakeholder values (Fig. 2). This increases the value of the available knowledge and tools to site managers, stakeholders and scientists:
a. Site managers: the relevance of knowledge and tools is increased when managers are able to predict the impact on visitor densities of changes in access for recreation, for example by changing the location or capacity of car parks or temporarily closing parts of the area. The importance of this characteristic was previously advocated by Pullin et al. (2004) and Gutzwiller et al. (2017).
b. Stakeholders: the validity of knowledge and tools is increased when stakeholders can associate the output of the tools with the values they adhere to, as was advocated by Chan et al. (2016) and McCool (2016).
c. Scientists: confidence in knowledge and tools is increased when scientists can use standardized methods and develop tools that are based on accepted scientific methods and concepts (Nicolson et al. 2002).
Figure 2. Finding a balance between credibility, salience and legitimacy by developing tools that use scientific methods to link management actions to acknowledged stakeholders values.
In Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 I showed that the tools are able to assess the impact on visitor densities in an area of temporal or spatial changes in access, such as temporary closures of car parks. I chose these factors as they have the largest impact on visitor densities in
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