Page 75 - A bird’s-eye view of recreation - Rogier Pouwels

Relating local impacts to regional conservation targets
We suggest that our approach can facilitate groups of local area managers with collaborative decision making regarding the dual mandate of achieving conservation targets while providing opportunities for outdoor recreation. The approach relates visitor numbers to conservation targets for protected bird species at local and regional scale level. We think that the spatially explicit output of the regression models inform about which management alternative might be most effective. In some areas reducing visitor numbers might be the most effective measure to increase bird densities while in other areas improving habitat characteristics is most effective. Providing a variety of solutions to increase the population of Woodlarks at different locations will increase collaborative decision making between different management units as well as different stakeholders (Van Herk et al., 2011).
Acknowledgements
This paper is a product of the research program “Basic Research Programme (WOT- 4 04-002)” of the Statutory Research Tasks Unit for Nature & the Environment which is
funded by the Dutch Ministry of Economics, Agriculture and Innovation, and carried
out by Wageningen University Research. We thank Adrienn Aranyosi who helped in
the development of the recreational maps and Lawrence Jones-Walters for his editorial improvements. We also thank the reviewer of this paper for the constructive comments and the many volunteers that collected the bird data.
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