Striking the right balance between visitor experience and environmental conservation is a key objective for managers of natural areas. Beyond visitation peaks, the day-to-day management of these areas requires regular monitoring, as well as appropriate tools and methods.
Here are a few examples of how visitor data can be used to manage the visitor experience in natural environments.
Managing the visitor experience at Acadia National Park, USA
Acadia National Park is one of the most popular national parks in the United States. Its many miles of trails, mountains and coastline is open year-round to national and international visitors.
They are one of the smallest national parks in the United States—ranking 50th out of 63 by size—while getting an estimated 4 million visits per year. This makes the visitor experience a major concern for Acadia's park managers.
Eagle Lake Bridge from the carriage roads of Acadia National Park.
Acadia's managers use count data to help improve the visitor experience. One example is on their famous, almost century-old carriage roads. Stretching over 45 miles (72 km), they provide a path for visitors to see Acadia’s mountains, valleys, and waterfalls. However, they can become crowded during peak seasons, which is why park management started using trail counters.
By counting at critical points on the carriage roads, Acadia could understand their carrying capacities. In essence, a road’s carrying capacity is the number of people that can be on it before it becomes “too crowded.”
Wheelchair Accessible Carriage funded by the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation crosses over the Stanley Brook carriage road bridge in Seal Harbor. (Photo by Julia Walker Thomas/Friends of Acadia)
When counts get too high, Acadia mobilizes park staff to recommend alternate routes so visitors can have a better experience. Since they had data for both bicycles and pedestrians, they did the same with cyclists as they checked in to the visitor center.
Read about more ways Acadia National Park uses their count data here.
Measuring and anticipating site saturation at Parc Miribel Jonage, France
At France's Parc Miribel Jonage, park managers have also equipped themselves with pedestrian, bicycle, and car counters to enhance the park's visitor experience.
This 5400-acre park is located between the south of the department of Ain and the Lyon conurbation. It is a leisure and recreation area, as well as a drinking water reserve for 95% of the Lyon region. It is also a site of exceptional natural heritage and is classified as a Natura 2000 site.
The visitor data they collected allowed them to determine the number of cars present on site and to establish different thresholds: regular parking, illegal parking, and impossible parking.
Hourly traffic profile and site saturation thresholds examples, credit Christophe Jarraud, Segapal
Impossible parking is problematic because it restricts busses from accessing the park. With a view of reducing environmental impact, it is vital to encourage access via public transport. The data collected is used to support actions and policies to be implemented to prevent this phenomenon from occurring.
Among the measures taken: the introduction of an express bus service to the park, which reduced journey times by a factor of three compared with a conventional bus service (and encouraged modal shift). As well, the construction of 47 miles (75km) of bike paths has also helped to reduce the use of private cars to get to the park.
Analysis of visitor data also revealed that 50% of visits were via the historic entrance to the site, compared to 16-20% via the Machet entrance. The aim is to rebalance visits between the historic entrances and the new ones, in order to reduce overall congestion on the site. Communication and signage work has been undertaken to better direct visitors to the Machet entrance, and counts are being taken to measure the impact of these measures.
Developing and adapting resources in Mount Royal Park, Canada
Mount Royal Park is one of Montreal's most important green spaces. Designed by Frederic Law Olmsted and inaugurated in 1876, it is the centerpiece of the Mount Royal heritage site, the oldest municipally protected area in Quebec.
Mount Royal Park (Beaver Lake).
To work on issues of accessibility, conservation, heritage enhancement, management, and planning, the park has equipped itself with 22 counting systems. This includes permanent pedestrian counters (PYRO Boxes) and temporary bicycle counters to monitor visitor numbers in Mont Royal Park, Jeanne Mance Park, and Tiohtia:ké Otsira'kehné Park, the three main parks on the heritage site.
According to the city of Montreal:
“The data is a real decision-making tool. They enable us to plan better development projects, adapted to the observed traffic. They provide a better understanding of the distribution of visitor numbers, and enable us to better plan the resources required to support the services offered in the park."
Some examples of use:
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Attendance data is used to measure winter ski and snowshoe trail use.
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The data can be used to validate the need for more sustainable development of secondary trails in wooded areas and to justify planned interventions to advisory and decision-making bodies.
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The data also allowed them to determine the volume of bicycle traffic and to better understand potential conflicts of use.
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Finally, thanks to the integration of GPS data, the data will make it possible to quantify illegal sporting practices in natural environments (mountain biking and off-trail racing bikes) that damage flora and fauna.
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Key figures from count data
In 2006, studies estimated the number of visitors to Mount Royal Park at 4.5M (and 2.5M for Jeanne Mance Park).
In 2024, the volume of visitors to Mount Royal Park will be at least 4.8M.
Since the installation of the counters, an increase in visitor numbers of 6.6% between 2022 and 2023 has been observed. To date and over a comparable period, the increase is 8.8% between 2023 and 2024.
An upward trend is therefore taking hold, likely driven by changes in habits linked to the pandemic, the overall increase in Montreal's population, and perhaps a new tendency to take advantage of urban parks rather than going out of town.
Conclusion
In short, data informs decision-making, enabling us to justify developments and implement measures to improve the visitor experience. This includes implementing vehicle parking reservations, measuring visitor saturation in different areas, and following visitation trends for more extensive redevelopment projects. Count data is vital when considering measures to both restrict and expand visitor access. Without reliable, ground-truth data, it is much more difficult to justify these actions.