Page 16 - A bird’s-eye view of recreation - Rogier Pouwels

A bird's-eye view of recreation
Cash et al. (2006), not being able to cross spatial and jurisdictional scales complicates negotiations between stakeholders and managers. Most current scientific knowledge and tools are not suitable for providing managers with spatial information that links local management actions to regional targets.
Managers will be much more able to choose between management options if they know the effectiveness of potential solutions (Gill 2007, Pullin et al. 2004, Cook et al. 2010). Adequate predictions are needed because further collaboration between recreation and conservation stakeholders depends at least in part on successful outcomes of management actions (Stankey et al. 2005, Williams et al. 2007). However, site managers often lack information on recreational use (Buckley et al. 2008, Mann et al. 2010) as well as information on the dose–impact relation between recreational use and bird populations (McCool 2005, Sutherland 2007). Moreover, as visitor distribution and densities are often heterogeneous, site managers are unlikely to be able to identify the locations in their area where bird populations are most likely to be affected by visitors or to determine by how much they should restrict visitor access to reduce impacts to an acceptable level (Coppes and Braunisch 2013, Hadwen et al. 2007). If managers do not have the scientific evidence they need on which to base their actions, they will fall back on their own experience (Dilling and Lemos 2011, Pullin et al. 2004). Although information based on local experience generally meets the criterion of salience, it often lacks credibility and stakeholders might question its legitimacy (Pullin and Knight 2009, Cook et al. 2013). For example, site managers use flight distances to create buffer zones where recreation is not permitted, based on the assumption that flight responses by individual birds affect the population density or viability (Ikuta and Blumstein 2003, Moran-Lopez et al. 2006, Livezey et al. 2016). As these precautionary management actions are taken only in the interests of bird conservation and restrict visitor access, recreation stakeholders may feel that these measures are unfair, which could undermine support for conservation actions (Redpath et al. 2013, Van de Molen et al. 2016).
In summary, for scientific knowledge on the impact of recreation on birds to be of practical use, it should be credible, salient and legitimate. For this knowledge to be credible, the local situation should be assessed using sound scientific evidence; for it to be salient, this evidence should be interpreted within the local context (area characteristics, target species, recreational use); and for this knowledge to be legitimate, it needs to be linked to conservation and recreation targets and open to deliberation, and the values connected with such targets should be negotiable. However, there are trade-offs between these three attributes and each attribute is
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