Wildlife Parks Visitor Management Issues

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Table of Contents

Executive summary
Introduction
Brief Background of the Attraction Type
Identification of Issues, Management Solutions and Recommendations
Recommendations
Conclusion
References

Executive summary

This paper looks at five main issues that relate to visitor management in wildlife parks. It considers wildlife parks that have plants and animals, as well as those that only have wild plants. Parks of any size are included in the discussion as long as they have wildlife and are recognised as wildlife parks. The paper considers some example cases in specific aspects of management such as systems used or the legal status of the parks.

The five issues that it identifies as being critical and having the highest effect of visitor management are as follows. One of them is the visitor inventory management, which concerns the handling of things that visitors possess and use as part of their visitation, including vehicles. Another issue is visitor flow modelling, which looks at the extent of analysing the characteristics and movements of visitors in the parks. The modelling is a technique used to come up with capacity needs for the parks and to influence decisions regarding other visitor management efforts.

The goal is to have accurate and timely information about visitor characteristics that is useful for making strategic choices such as altering the flow of visitors. However, the paper also shows that the legal basis of sustaining park visitor management efforts is also another issue affecting park administration. The parks have a set of laws that governs their operations.

However, in case of handling visitors, they can be limited in their jurisdiction or their ability to enforce rules so that visitors adhere to restrictions. Finally, the report discusses a final issue of budgetary support. It shows that all efforts by park managers rely on the availability of adequate funds for operations. The paper also considers the structure of parks that might affect their source of funds and ability to self-generate funds.

Introduction

Wildlife parks around the world are key attraction points for tourists keen on exploring nature. An increase in the number of visitor to a particular park is beneficial because of the associated increase in revenue. However, the increased footprint also acts as a cost to management of the park ecosystem. Administrators of wildlife parks have to employ different strategies of visitor management to ensure that they have a balance of demand by visitors and the available regeneration capacity of the wildlife parks. Visitors to parks arrive on foot, vehicles and by air or boat depending on the nature of the wildlife park.

The machinery used to access the park also has a significant effect on the ecology of the attraction. Visitor management refers to the use of policies and interventions that an agency of a protected area and its managers use in aspects of park tourism. Visitors are persons who come to the wildlife park and participate in one or more activities that the park avails (Hyslop & Eagles, 2007).

Brief Background of the Attraction Type

Wildlife parks are part of protected areas around the world. They play a critical role in enhancing the value of people in a given locality. Wildlife parks only include undomesticated animals and plants. They are sometimes fenced off from unauthorised entry and to control the movement of wild animals. The parks are managed by different administrative units in different countries. For example, they can be under a county government or a central government department. Some wildlife parks are under a private management firm that is licensed to operate and maintain them on behalf of a public authority.

Identification of Issues, Management Solutions and Recommendations

Visitor Inventory Management

Wildlife parks have a visitor carrying capacity. This capacity relates to both the actual number of visitors and the additional equipment and objects that visitors may bring to a park during the visits. Many parks have to provide two functions: they have to protect the natural resource and meet the recreation objective of their visitors at the same time.

The management of parks follows a conventional business model where visitor revenues go towards the administrative costs of the park. Surpluses revert back to the management authority and deficits require the authority to meet part of the budgetary costs. Therefore, parks have to come up with sustainable criteria for letting in visitors and must find out an optimum number of visitors that the wildlife park can carry (Ament, Clevenger, Yu, & Hardy, 2008).

One risk of allowing visitors into wildlife parks is that they can carry with them food items and materials that are dangerous to wildlife. For example, plastic bags of any size can cause havoc in a pack because they are not edible by wild animals. Visitors who bring plastic bags in this case have to leave with the bags or dispose them correctly. The challenge of park managers is to ensure that such rules are enforced and visitors report any violation (Moore & Taplin, 2014).

Visitor Flow Modelling

For parks to sufficiently manage their visitors, they need appropriate ways of visitor monitoring. However, a head count of the number of visitors into the park is not enough to inform the right strategic decisions by park management concerning visitor management.

Managers have to understand the behaviour of visitors inside the parks, the motivations of visitation and many other issues that relate to the park or the visitor. For example, some parks have some areas that are very popular with visitors at different times of the day and of the year. Park managers need accurate information to manage peak and off-peak demand for these areas (Buckley, Robinson, Carmody, & King, 2008).

Therefore, a challenge that they face is finding the right method of collecting data about visitors and using the data appropriately for planning and implementing new strategies. There are a number of conventional systems used to assist managers to accomplish their objects. For example, there are classification systems for visitors and for the different type of parks, and their ability to cope with visitor disturbances.

Managers have to identify different sections of the park and visitors that correspond to a particular classification. Thereafter, they proceed to implement protocols for managing visitors based on classifications. The main issue here is on finding the right classification system that is advanced enough to ensure that managers are able to achieve their objectives of balance visitor leisure utility and park sustainability.

Obtaining Accurate Visitor Information

National parks have to continually undergo development to respond to change in the environment and consumer demand. Therefore, managers need to effectively come up with descriptions of their visitor characteristics and to spot trends in the changes on visitor characteristics. Typically, park managers rely on a combination of traffic and visitor observation or surveys.

For sampling, the common method is spatial or use of temporal dimensions. The problem that managers face in accomplishing the sample task is the allocation of sample days. First, they have to deal with the fact that not all visitor characteristics may be obtained on days where the visitor numbers are high (Kruger & Saayman, 2014).

In addition, the typical visitor characteristic captured may not cover all the potential visitor characteristics that a park will have. Therefore, when making plans about visitor management, parks always have a risk of failure to mitigate some visitor behaviour or characteristics that can be costly to the park or to other visitors. A number of researchers have provided possible solutions on the methodology of sampling visitor characteristics to enhance visitor information in for any park.

While these methods are insightful, they still require sufficient accommodation to handle a particular park’s situation for them to be fully usable. Moreover, parks provide different opportunities for their visitors such as overnight stay or day only use. At the same time, there are exceptions to what visitors can bring to the park, such that a standard sampling method may leave out some critical information about a certain visitor category.

Another challenge for collecting sufficient visitor information is the lack of integration of park’s information management systems with other public infrastructure systems. In some countries, parks are managed in isolation and have to implement their own visitor identification systems. Many do not go beyond the capturing of the identification details of visitors.

It would be helpful for parks to embrace a deep strategy for information collection. This will include active monitoring of individual visitors to the park to have a frequency record for visitors and for particular areas of the park. Another challenge created by this need to have sufficient information about visitor behaviour is the limitation of infrastructure space in parks.

Finding a Legal Basis for Sustaining Visitor Management Efforts

The extent to which park mangers establish rules to govern visitor behaviour depends on the legal provisions available for their use. Parks have to adhere to conventional legal provisions such as human rights when dealing with visitors. In addition, they must comply with any federal or local laws that govern their operations. Thus, when implementing various systems for visitor management, such as altering the visitation times and durations to realise the appropriate balance between revenue collection and sustainability, the parks have to ensure that the time allocation correspond to present legislation.

In many countries, especially Europe, the development of a legal framework for the management of parks, including the management of visitors is ongoing. In Germany, there is an ongoing process to come up with new legislation that will alter the usage of parks such that there is an overall increase in natural states of the present vegetation (Burns & Moreira, 2013).

Parks that do not have reliable legal frameworks to use in their management face risks of being overwhelmed by visitor demands. Unless they have legal protection to ensure that they are safeguarded areas and have sufficient rights to limit the behaviours of visitors, they run the risk of dealing with visitors who have no regard for rules and regulations of conduct within the parks. Moreover, legal enforcement of rules allows parks to increase compliance with direct or indirect behaviour intervention. For example, the risk of jail term can influence a visitor’s behaviour against feeding animals with food brought from outside the park (Mallick & Driessen, 2003).

Budgetary Support

Currently, many wildlife parks operate on a fixed budget support from their respective governments. Yet, there are increasing demands to invest in appropriate technologies and other solutions that will facilitate efficient and effective visitor management. In this regard, park administrators lack sufficient funds for research and development of their operations and their parks. As such, they are unable to meet their main objective of ensuring sufficient regeneration of the parks natural resources, which is the wildlife. Eventually, the park administrators will have to let in more visitor numbers and compromise on the particular park’s ecosystem. Unless this tendency is checked by the provision of sufficient budget support, results by management will not be very encouraging (Hannam, 2005).

The assessment of the contribution of tourism activities with the support of wildlife parks is lacking in many parks. Without a reliable source of information for the parks, it is impossible to come with congruent suggestions for budgetary support that will have a significant impact on park management. In some cases, budgetary support for parks does not come from the government; instead, it comes from the local community that owns the parks as part of community land.

The support is not regular and in such cases the seasonality affects the ability of park managers to implement their visitor management strategies (Spencer & Nsiah, 2013). Budget support issues may also emerge when looking at staffs and other administration member compensation. In most cases parks are government by trustees with some members being civil servants while others are appointed from a number of stakeholders. Furthermore, appointing authorities might have a legal mandate to appoint without a supporting capacity to offer budgetary support to the appointed park’s administration (Page, 2002).

Management of Issues

A variety of management strategies and actions are being implemented by park managers. They include zoning for different types of visitors. For example, a park can have one zone that allows visitors to move in with vehicles and other zones where visitors are only allowed to interact with wildlife from a distance. These are solutions that aim to limit the physical load to the ecosystems and to reduce disturbance of wild animals in their natural habitat. Besides the rules, park managers also use educational material and programs availed for tours to the parks. The education focuses on appropriate conduct of visitors and is also a way of ensuring that there is no delivery of contraband products by visitors into the park.

There are different classifications of the approaches used by management to ensure that visitors adhere to the rules of the parks. Direct management regulates and restricts visitor behaviour. Therefore, it ends up creating a perception of reduced visitor freedom when used effectively.

The challenge for managers is to use the direct approach and at the same time allow visitors as much freedom as possible on what they can bring to the park and how they are to conduct themselves within the parks. Indirect approaches give visitors options to follow if they are to behave in a certain way. An example of direct management approaches is the limitation of axes and matches in the park to prevent damage to trees. Providing a designated area for camping within the park is also another direct intervention.

When dealing with risk of visitor inventories, managers also use the containment or dispersal strategy to deal with the danger posed by visitors. Containment limits the spatial extent of visitor impacts. On the other hand, the dispersal approach reduces frequency of use so that there is no permanent damage to the wildlife resource.

For visitor flow modelling issue, parks can have specialised management systems’ development, which utilise various technologies, they still have to configure and frequently update the systems (Akama & Kieti, 2003). In addition, they must train management staffs on usage and must consider changes in visitor behaviour over time. Currently, a number of comprehensive systems for classification and monitoring visitors are in place in many parks around the world. Spatial elements used in planning and management frameworks have been useful. They exist in U.S. National Park Service’s Visitor Experience and Resource Protection (VERP) system as an example.

In many countries, the legal basis for national parks exists within the federal nature conservation acts or equivalent acts. In cases where there is no a clear demarcation of the federal laws and the state laws, a park administration can have difficulties, but problems are more likely to emerge under the budgetary support issue.

Recommendations

Unlike commercial spaces and public areas, protected areas for wildlife require the ecosystem to remain undisturbed. Park administrators should not freely erect surveillance systems and radio towers. They cannot create roads and footpaths unless they ascertain that harm to wildlife will be minimal. Therefore, they should note that, the ability to monitor visitors throughout their stay in parks is limited. Consequently, many parks should continue working with estimates on visitor characteristics rather than actual data due to these limitations.

The issues highlighted end up curtailing efforts that the administration would have towards effective management of visitors in wildlife parks (Smith, 2011). In cases where visitor management includes preventive measures to prevent harm on wildlife, any failure to meet budgetary needs for wildlife parks ends up creating additional regeneration hurdles (Metzger et al., 2010). Therefore, funds for the management of the parks must be availed by the relevant authorities at all times.

Conclusion

There are concerns affecting effecting visitor management in wildlife parks and this paper has discussed five of them. The discussion identifies and explains the occurrence of these issues. It also offers a description of potential effects of the issues when they are not effectively addressed by the wildlife park administrations. The issues identified in this paper are visitor flow modelling issues, obtaining accurate visitor information to facilitate planning efforts, budgetary support issues, finding a legal basis for sustaining visitor management efforts and dealing with visitor investor management.

These issues directly affect the ability of park administrators to effectively manage visitors so that there is a balance with the need for recreation and the ability of parks to support the activities. The paper shows that without sufficient coordination of activities of the respective park managers and the public administration bodies such as state and federal governments, there can be little progress made. It is important to pay attention to the vulnerability of the wildlife parks to any disturbances in their natural ecosystem as recovery after interferences is not guaranteed.

References

Akama, J. S., & Kieti, D. M. (2003). Measuring tourist satisfaction with Kenya’s wildlife safari: a case study of Tsavo West National Park. Tourism Management, 24(1), 73-81.

Ament, R., Clevenger, A., Yu, O., & Hardy, A. (2008). An assessment of road impacts on wildlife populations in U.S. national parks. Environmental Management, 42(3), 480-496.

Buckley, R., Robinson, J., Carmody, J., & King, N. (2008). Monitoring for management of conservation and recreation in Australian protected areas. Biodiversity and Conservation, 17(14), 3589-3606.

Burns, R. C., & Moreira, J. C. (2013). Visitor manageemnt in Brazil’s protected areas: Benchmarking for best practices in resource management. The George Write Forum, 30(2), 163-170.

Hannam, K. (2005). Tourism Management Issues in India’s National Parks: An Analysis of the Rajiv Gandhi (Nagarahole) National Park. Current Issues in Tourism, 8(2-3), 165-180. doi:10.1080/13683500508668212

Hyslop, K., & Eagles, P. J. (2007). Visitor management policy of national parks, national wildlife areas and refuges in Canada and the united states: A policy analysis of public documents. Leisure/Loisir, 31(2), 475-499.

Kruger, M., & Saayman, M. (2014). The determinants of visitor length of stay at the Kruger National Park. Koedoe: African Protected Area Conservation and Science, 56(2), 1-11.

Mallick, S. A., & Driessen, M. M. (2003). Feeding of wildlife: How effective are the ‘Keep Wildlife Wild’ signs in Tasmania’s National Parks? Ecological Management & Restoration, 4(3), 199-204.

Metzger, K. L., Sinclair, A. R., Hilborn, R., Grant, J., Hopecraft, C., & Mduma, S. A. (2010). Evaluation the protection of wildlife in parks: The case of African buffalo in Serengeti. Biodiversity Conservatioin, 19, 3431-3444.

Metzger, K., Sinclair, A., Hilborn, R., Hopcraft, J., & Mduma, S. (2010). Evaluating the protection of wildlife in parks: the case of African buffalo in Serengeti. Biodiversity and Conservation, 19(12), 3431-3444.

Moore, S. A., & Taplin, R. (2014). A benchmarking method for visitor management by national park agencies. Visitor Studies, 17(1), 107-127.

Page, S. (2002). Tourism and national parks: issues and implications. Tourism Management, 23(3), 328-330. doi:10.1016/s0261-5177(01)00081-4

Smith, C. A. (2011). The role of state wildlife professionals under the public trust doctrine. The Journal of Wildlife Management, 75(7), 1539-1543.

Spencer, D. M., & Nsiah, C. (2013). The economic consequences of community support for tourism: A case study of a heritage fish hatchery. Tourism Management, 34, 221-230.

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