title: Shifting Paradigms in Recreation Management: Applying Social-Ecological System Frameworks to Parks and Protected Areas
Creators: name: Creany, Noah
Publisher: name: Utah State University
Year: 2024

description: Park and protected area (PPA) recreation management is often characterized by social, ecological, and managerial dimensions. These dimensions have increasingly been conceptualized as social-ecological systems (SESs) to understand the complex interrelationships between them. Contemporary trends of increased visitation on public lands in the United States, including US National Parks, have accentuated the complex interactions between the amount of recreation use, the capacity of the setting, the quality of the visitor experience, and ecological resource conditions. These challenges of managing recreation use and understanding these interactions will be further compounded by climate change and its effects on ecosystem composition and dynamics. The first chapter will provide the context for this dissertation that illustrates these challenges to PPA management in the context of global conservation and habitat conservation efforts. Examining the complex interactions between social, ecological, and managerial dimensions in park and protected area recreation management through the lens of social-ecological systems is part of an evolving adaptive management paradigm for PPAs and natural resources.
The second chapter is centered on the managed-access Timed-Entry Reservation System (TEPS) reservation system in Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP), where managers utilized the park’s transportation system to target desired conditions and consequently moderate the flow of people and vehicles entering the park. We developed an email-based survey instrument to understand visitors’ evaluations of their experience under the TEPS system and elicited their attitudes toward use-limiting strategies such as TEPS. We found that 78% of the respondents reflected favorably on the managed-access park experience, although these attitudes are often value-laden and involve expectations about the conditions they experience.
The third and fourth chapters shift the focus to a management experiment the evaluates the effect of a direct trail management action in PPAs in Orange County, CA, which introduced direction and use-type trail designations. The third chapter evaluates the efficacy of these approaches, which have not been systematically studied in the literature on recreation management, to address concerns regarding visitor experience, safety, and conflict. The fourth chapter will evaluate the effects of these trail management strategies on trail resource conditions by monitoring biophysical indicators of recreation disturbance with a UAV (drone) prior to and after the management actions were implemented. Together, these third and fourth chapters will illustrate these complex and coupled interactions between the social and ecological dimensions of PPA management and provide a novel contribution to the literature by jointly examining them as part of the experimental design.
The fifth and concluding chapter provides reflection upon the preceding chapters and their contributions to PPA recreation management.