Page 114 - A bird’s-eye view of recreation - Rogier Pouwels

A bird's-eye view of recreation
knowledge and tools is new knowledge about the impact of visitors on bird species. Bötsch et al. (2017) showed that even low visitor densities had an impact on the diversity and the density of breeding birds. Also, new types of outdoor recreation and new conservation policies would introduce new stakeholders into the decision-making process.
In the light of changes in stakeholder attitudes and social relationships, Kunseler et al. (2015) and Sarkki et al. (2015) suggested that flexibility or adaptability should be added as an attribute of scientific knowledge in addition to credibility, salience and legitimacy. In Chapter 5 I showed that this extra attribute is important for integrating site-specific data and knowledge into existing tools. How this will affect the use of tools in the decision-making process is a subject for further research. One aspect to consider is that adapting scientific tools during the process should follow guiding principles of scientific soundness, such as sensitivity analyses and validation (Refsgaard and Henriksen 2004, Nicolson et al. 2002), which may not be feasible or may affect the credibility of the tool. On the other hand, rigid tools may reduce legitimacy as stakeholders might argue that their values are not adequately taken into account. The balance between the credibility, salience and legitimacy of tools should therefore be evaluated at regular intervals during their development and use (Van Voorn et al. 2016). However, Sarkki et al. (2013) and Heink et al. (2015) state that although the three attributes are helpful in evaluating the effectiveness of scientific knowledge, they are difficult to apply.
As a first step, a checklist for scientific tools provided by Van Voorn et al. (2016) might be used to evaluate the level of credibility, salience and legitimacy. Although it has not been applied yet and some limitations have been addressed by Van Voorn et al. (2016), I propose using this checklist to evaluate the attributes of knowledge and tools in a decision-making process. Site managers and stakeholders can choose the most relevant criteria from the current list of 10 criteria for credibility, 13 for salience and 15 for legitimacy. The criteria could also be ranked if managers and stakeholders assign values to them (Cash et al. 2003, Sarkki et al. 2013, Van Voorn et al. 2016). Experiences with these assessments could be used to make further improvements at regular intervals. Experience from several applications in different decision-making process might result in defining minimum or preferred levels of credibility, salience and legitimacy.
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